Seget, and Crete
A published monograph on an estate near Umag says something no family account here had: that there were two branches of this family in Istria — one seated at Gologorica, the other at Umag and Seget — and that the second came out of Crete.
The stancija at Seget, a few kilometres south of Umag, is the subject of a 2019 monograph published by the Croatian Ministry of Culture. Its second chapter is titled Obitelj de Franceschi i Seget u povijesnim izvorima — the de Franceschi family and Seget in the historical sources — and it states the thing plainly:
“There were two branches of the family in Istria, one seated at Gologorica, and the other at Umag and Seget. Family archives survive from both.”
The Umag branch reached Istria by fleeing Crete after the Candian War of 1669, when the Ottomans took the island from Venice. Half a century later they bought the estate.
How the estate came to them
| 1604 | Venice grants the Seget and Đube lands to families fleeing Greece and Montenegro. |
| 1623 | Captain Vincenzo Cuchich of Šibenik sells the land to the Venier, a noble house of Venice. The contract mentions only a pasture — nothing is built yet. |
| 1669 | The de Franceschi flee Crete after the Candian War and reach Istria. |
| 1720 | Nicolò and Marc'Antonio de Franceschi, sons of Giorgio, buy all of Catarina Bernardo Venier's possessions in Venetian Istria, Seget among them. |
| 1724 | The year cut into a portal on the estate. |
| 1730 | Umag grants them citizenship, and all their heirs with them. |
| 1732 | The year and the initials M A · F cut into the stone well-head — Marc'Antonio Franceschi. |
| 1790 | Alvise dies; his sons divide the estate, and the deed lists the palace room by room. |
| 1818 | Seget is drawn on the Franciscan cadastre, the palace already standing with its chapel. |
| 1879 | Carlo De Franceschi, writing at Gologorica's other branch, records them as «la nobile famiglia De Franceschi, attuale posseditrice, emigrata dall'isola di Candia». |
| 1945 | One De Franceschi family is still counted at Seghetto in the Istrian census. |
The household
| Name | Dates | What the sources say |
|---|---|---|
| Giorgio de Franceschi | — | father of the two brothers who bought Seget |
| Nicolò de Franceschi | — | bought Seget jointly in 1720 |
| Marc'Antonio de Franceschi | 1671–1758 | civil and military physician; married Crissulla Marulli in 1727; eleven children |
| Crissulla Marulli | — | his wife — a Greek name, Chrysoula Marouli, carrying the Cretan origin |
| Nicolò | d. 1792 | son; lawyer at Koper, died without heirs |
| Angelo | — | son; his family settled at Brtonigla |
| Alvise de Franceschi | 1727–c.1790 | son; lived at Seget; the family genealogy records him as «Dragomanno alla Porta ottomana» — dragoman at the Ottoman court. Married Francesca Borella, six children |
Giorgio · Nicolò · Cristina · Giovanni Battista · Vittorio · Palissena · Maria · Lugrezia · Alvise · Angelo · Caterina
Nicolò · Dorotea · Giacomo · Marc'Antonio · Giovanni Battista · Angelo
Two details carry the Cretan origin without needing to argue it. Marc'Antonio's wife is Crissulla Marulli — Chrysoula Marouli, a Greek name, not an Istrian one. And his son Alvise is recorded in the family's own genealogy as Dragomanno alla Porta ottomana: dragoman, the interpreter-diplomat, at the Ottoman court. A family two generations out of Crete would have the Greek and the Turkish to do that work.
The estate itself still carries their marks. A portal cut with 1724; the stone well-head in front of the house cut with 1732 and the initials M A · F.
Two family archives, and two family trees
This is the most valuable thing on the page. Both branches deposited their papers, and both are catalogued.
| Fond | Where | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
| HR-DARI-382 | State Archive, Rijeka | fond de Franceschi — letters, contracts, wills, inventories and accounts over several centuries. Box 1 holds the «Albero genealogico della Famiglia de Franceschi», about 1896, naming every member with dates of birth, death and marriage. |
| HR-DAPA-828 | State Archive, Pazin | fond de Franceschi — box 3 holds the «Albero genealogico dei Signori de Franceschi, Umago», 1927, listing the male members only. Box 3 also holds a notebook of copied letters, «Raccolta di varie lettere eleganti e familiari», about 1830. |
| Catasto franceschino | Archivio di Stato di Trieste | foglio 16, sezione 20, 548 B 20 — the 1818 cadastral sheet showing the estate. |
What Carlo's own book adds
Reading L'Istria: note storiche (1879) for the family rather than for the history turns up four things.
| 1102 | Carlo's own book records «Golgoriza (Moncalvo)» among the first Slavic place-names to appear in Istrian diplomas — the earliest documented mention of Gologorica, written by a man born there. |
| 1562 | A ducale of 24 March licenses Leonardo Fioravanti, «Sabba de Franceschi» and Vincenzo dall'Acqua, all of Bologna, to bring a hundred and twenty-four families to Pola to clear land. |
| 1600s | Among the noble families then living at Pola he lists the Franceschi, «venuti da Capodistria» — come from Koper. |
| 1879 | His source for the Fontane and Umag colonists is «il sig. Giambattista De Franceschi deputato al Consiglio dell'Impero», who drew it from his own family archive. |
The first is worth sitting with. Carlo De Franceschi spent his life arguing for the Italian character of Istria. In the middle of a passage on when Slavic place-names begin to appear in the record, he notes that in 1102 one finds Golgoriza — and adds the Italian name in brackets, Moncalvo. It is the earliest documented mention of his own birthplace, and he is recording it as evidence of Slavic settlement.
Petar Puhmajer, «Stancija de Franceschi u Segetu kod Umaga», Mala biblioteka Godišnjaka zaštite spomenika kulture Hrvatske sv. 20, Ministarstvo kulture RH, Zagreb 2019, ISBN 978-953-312-048-5 — with Carlo De Franceschi, «L'Istria: note storiche» (Parenzo 1879).
A county in Crete, and a shipwreck coming home
A 2020 feature in la Voce del popolo — the Italian-language daily of Rijeka — sets out the Seghetto family's own account of itself, and it explains what the branch was doing in Crete in the first place.
They were not merchants there. They held a county. In the Veneto-Turkish war of 1538 the counts de Franceschi defended the Cretan ports of Calus, Lemiores and Sabionera with nine hundred vassals of their own county, at their own expense — and in 1581 the Duke of Candia, Marcantonio Querini, confirmed them the privileges of mero et misto imperio, the delegated power to administer justice, for services rendered “nelle più ardue ricorrenze, col somministrar gente, haveri et cavalli, esponendo ancora se stessi ai rischi di guerra per la difesa del Regno” — in the hardest of times, supplying men, goods and horses, and exposing themselves to the risks of war for the defence of the Kingdom.
In 1669, when Candia fell to the Turks, part of Morosini's galleys took aboard the Venetian families who had asked to be brought home. On the way the fleet met a terrible storm; the ships were wrecked, and only a small number of the refugees were saved. The de Franceschi were among the survivors.
That is the sentence the Seget story turns on. The family did not simply relocate. They were evacuated by Morosini's galleys with the other Venetian families of Candia, and the fleet that carried them was wrecked in a storm on the way home. The people who bought the Umago estate fifty-one years later were the ones who got out of the water.
| When | The honours, as the family records them |
|---|---|
| 474 | The family's own origin story: Feramondo de Franceschi, who fought Odoacer, and after the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476 withdrew to Padua and then Venice. Legend — but the name Ferramondo was still being given to sons of this house in the twentieth century. |
| 1211–1257 | Emigrated to Candia with the Venetian colonies, receiving fiefs from the Doge, and became noble feudatories of Crete. |
| 1488 | The first de Franceschi actually proved in the nobiliary registers of the Archive of the Duke of Candia: Luca di Nicolò. His father Nicolò was castellan of Castel Milopotamo in 1500. |
| 1538 | In the Veneto-Turkish war they defended the Cretan ports of Colus, Lemiores and Sabbionera with the vassals of their county, at their own expense. |
| 1567 | Marcantonio de Franceschi is Secretary of the Council of Ten — the same office, a generation after Andrea de' Franceschi held the Grand Chancellorship. |
| 1581 | Marcantonio Querini, Duke of Candia, confirms the privileges of mero e misto impero. Comital title, confirmed again in 1688. |
| 16 Jul 1716 | The brothers Carlo, Giovanni Battista, Costantino and Domenico, sons of the late Lodovico, give the Republic one hundred thousand ducats. The Senate raises the family unanimously from the Order of Secretaries to the Sovereign Patrician Order and inscribes it in the Libro d'Oro. |
| 1730 | Marcantonio Franceschi, a native of Candia, is living in Istria. |
| 1744 | Aggregated to the nobility of Parenzo. (The newspaper gives 1774; the armorial 1744.) |
| 1802 | Aggregated to the Noble Council of Capodistria. |
| 1824–25 | Confirmed noble by the Emperor Francis I of Austria. |
| 1892 | Giovanni Battista de Franceschi is Podestà of Umago. |
| 1931 | The title of nobles of Capodistria recognised in the Official List of the Italian nobility. |
The arms on the tympanum
“Troncato di azzurro e d'oro al leone rampante al naturale.”
- a lion rampant proper, over the division
Per fess azure and or, a lion rampant proper; crest, the same lion issuant. Cut into the tympanum that Giorgio de Franceschi (1788–1865) added to the Seghetto façade in 1843–45. An older eighteenth-century achievement, cartouche-framed with an oval shield, stands over the entrance below it. The Blasonario Giuliano records three further variants of the lion, and a Piacenza branch of 1802 that bore it over all.
Division and tinctures drawn. The lion named only — the dashed field marks where it stands. This is the Seghetto and Umago branch, out of Crete after 1669, and a different family from the Moncalvo one whose cross and pomegranate stand above.
Read off the building
The Blasonario Giuliano lists a second family of this name whose arms it can only give as “Di … al leone di …” — a lion, tinctures unrecorded. The Seghetto façade supplies them: troncato di azzurro e d'oro al leone rampante al naturale, per fess azure and or.
Great landowners: wine, oil, cereals, timber, and birds both live and slaughtered. Behind the house stood the coach-house, the produce stores, the colonists' dwellings and a nineteenth-century oil mill, whose presses and dozen stone oil jars — the pile — survived until the press was converted into a dwelling about twenty years ago. In their free time the colonists formed a wind band under the maestro Pietro Moro, and it was, the paper says, of decent success.
Two men of standing are recorded as guests of the house: Angelo Emo (1731–1792), The Venetian admiral who led the fleet to its last victories, in the expeditions of 1769 and 1784 against the Barbary corsairs. And Pietro Kandler (1805–1872), The Triestine father of Istrian historiography — and, two generations later, the scholarly predecessor of Carlo and Camillo De Franceschi of the other Istrian branch.
How the house was built, and what happened to the library
| When | What |
|---|---|
| 1603 | Venice settles thirty families in the Umago district under captain Vincenzo Chiucchel — Cuchich — of Šibenik, paying him six ducats a month for life and promising thirty ducats a family for livestock. Seghetto and neighbouring Giubba are part of that grant. |
| 1623 | Chiucchel sells the estate to the Valier of Venice. |
| 22 Nov 1720 | Nicolò and Marc'Antonio de Franceschi, sons of Giorgio, buy Seghetto with everything the noblewoman Caterina Bernardo, widow of Pietro Valier, held in Istria. |
| 1730 | Umago grants them citizenship, for themselves and their descendants. |
| after 1720 | Marc'Antonio de Franceschi (1671–1758), civil and military physician, begins the house around which the whole complex grows. |
| 1791 | The chapel of S. Costanza is already standing; it appears in an inventory of that year. |
| 1843–45 | Giorgio de Franceschi (1788–1865), son of Marc'Antonio and grandson of Alvise, commissions the great works: a grand internal staircase in the east wing, decoration by the painter Michele Urban, and on the façade two giant pilasters and a tympanum bearing the family arms — the neoclassical front still there. |
| c. 1875 | The east wing is added, holding on its ground floor a library of over four thousand volumes and the family archive. |
| 20th century | Library and archive both devastated. The room that held them was partitioned into smaller ones. |
| 2016 | On the initiative of the City of Umag, the stanzia of Seghetto enters the conservation programme. |
The east wing held over four thousand volumes, bought from the booksellers of Trieste, Piran, Buje and Poreč, and beside them the family archive — held by some scholars to be one of the richest libraries in Istria. Both were destroyed in the twentieth century, and the room that held them was cut up into smaller rooms.
Set that against the research log, where two surviving de Franceschi family archives — HR-DARI-382 at Rijeka and HR-DAPA-828 at Pazin — are listed as the largest untouched source in this project. The Seghetto library is the counter-example, and the reason to write those letters now rather than later.
The two branches, and what they did
The family split. One branch held the farms of Seghetto, Giubba and Spinel; the other, the Umago branch, held Rosazzo, Macalè — formerly Casoni — and Carsette.
| Who | When | What |
|---|---|---|
| Giacomo | 1808 | Member of the General Council of the Department of Istria. |
| Giorgio | 1866 | A physician; volunteered in the Risorgimento campaigns with Garibaldi. |
| Giovanni Battista, Francesco, Giacomo, Ettore | 1815–1918 | Mayors of Umago across a century. Giovanni Battista was a scholar and collector of unpublished manuscripts on the town's history. |
| Luigi | — | President of the Filarmonica Umaghese and of the Society of Mutual Aid; councillor of the Congregation of Charity, the Rural Bank and the Cooperative Purchasing Society. |
| Italo | — | An engineer. Built a brick works at Spinel, ruined by the Great War; designed and directed the church and campanile at Materada. |
| Ettore and Ferramondo | 1918–1945 | Commissioners of Umago through the Italian administration and the war. |
Source: «La tenuta de Franceschi di Seghetto», la Voce del popolo, storia&ricerca, issue 134, 23 May 2020 — with the family's entry in the Blasonario Giuliano (Unione degli Istriani), «Franceschi (de) — Seghetto, Capodistria, Umago», which is the fuller and more careful of the two and corrects two of the newspaper's dates.
What the 2020 article adds
A full feature on the estate — «La tenuta de Franceschi di Seghetto» — ran in «la Voce del popolo» on 23 May 2020, written out of the conservation survey the City of Umag commissioned in 2016 when Seget entered the Croatian Ministry of Culture's programme for cultural property. A copy has been in the family's own files ever since. This archive did not open it until September 2026.
| When | What | As the article gives it |
|---|---|---|
| 474 | Ferramondo, prefect Family lore | The article opens the family «nobili di origine romana» with a Ferramondo de Franceschi who fought Odoacer, king of the Heruli. Legend, and printed as such — but note that a Ferramondo de Franceschi is still being christened at Umag in the twentieth century. |
| 1211–1252 | Padua, Venice, then Candia | The family is said to have moved to Padua, then Venice, then to have emigrated to Crete with others in this window. |
| 1538 | The Venetian–Turkish war | They defended the ports of Calus, Lemiores and Sabionera with nine hundred vassals of their county, at their own expense. |
| 1581 | Mero et mixto imperio | Marcantonio Querini, duke of Candia, confirmed the counts de Franceschi in the privilege of mero et mixto imperio — delegated jurisdiction — on 30 December, for services «nelle più ardue ricorrenze, col somministrar gente, haveri et cavalli». Zaccaria Mocenigo renewed the comital title on 16 December 1688. |
| 1669 | The shipwreck | When Candia fell, Morosini's galleys took off the Venetian families who asked to go home. On the way the fleet met a terrible storm; the ships were wrecked and only a small number of refugees were saved. The de Franceschi were among the survivors, and at Venice were admitted to the «veneta cittadinanza originaria». |
| 1716 | A hundred thousand ducats | On 16 July, «causa gli urgenti bisogni della Serenissima», the brothers Carlo, Giovanni Battista, Costantino and Domenico made a donation of 100,000 ducats. The Senate raised the family from the Order of Secretaries to the Sovrano Ordine Patrizio and inscribed it in the Libro d'Oro of Venetian nobility. |
| 1774 · 1802 | Parenzo, then Capodistria | Aggregated to the nobility of Parenzo in 1774 and to the Noble Council of Capodistria in 1802; confirmed noble by the Emperor Francis I of Austria; entered on the Official List of the Italian Nobility as «nobili di Capodistria», recognised in 1931. |
| 22 Nov 1720 | The purchase, with its date | The brothers Nicolò and Marc'Antonio de Franceschi, sons of Giorgio, bought Seghetto together with everything the noblewoman Caterina Bernardo, widow of Pietro Valier, held in Istria — and from 1730 the citizenship of Umag for themselves and their descendants. |
The house, and the arms over its door
Marc'Antonio de Franceschi (1671–1758), a civil and military physician, began the manor after the purchase. The great works came in 1843–45, commissioned by Giorgio de Franceschi (1788–1865): a grand staircase in the eastern part, painted decoration, and the façade given two giant pilasters and a tympanum — which is where the arms are. Thirty years later the eastern wing went up, holding a library of over four thousand volumes bought from the booksellers of Trieste, Pirano, Buje and Poreč, together with an archive. Some scholars held it one of the richest libraries in Istria. It was devastated during the twentieth century and the room itself was later partitioned into smaller ones.
“Troncato di azzurro e d'oro al leone rampante al naturale.”
Per fess azure and or, a lion rampant proper. This archive has drawn the Seget arms until now with the lion named and not drawn, because no blazon for it had been found. Here is one — and it is the arms on the tympanum of the house itself, not a coat sold by surname. Over the monumental gate there is a second, older achievement: an eighteenth-century cartouche with an oval shield.
Behind the palace stood the coach-house, the granaries, the colonists' dwellings and a nineteenth-century oil mill whose presses and a dozen stone oil jars — the «pile» — survived until recently. A crenellated tower to the north-west watched the property; a «specola» stood a few hundred metres off. The de Franceschi traded wine, oil, cereals, timber and birds, live and slaughtered, and their colonists formed a wind band under a maestro Pietro Moro that did rather well.
The chapel of Santa Costanza
Built in the eighteenth century as patrician families did, with the saint's relics venerated on the high altar and two doors — one to the outside and one into the house. Inside, a small neoclassical altar of black and grey marble, and an altarpiece of the Assumption with Saints Anthony and Catherine. A seventeenth-century St Lucy on canvas has been restored by Kristina Bin Latal and Silvo Šarić of the Restoration Institute at Jursići. A St George painted on wood guards the inner door. A reliquary holds relics of St Andrew the Apostle, St Benedict Abbot, St Giles Abbot, St Anthony Abbot, St Romuald, St Felix martyr, and — «ex osse exusto» — St Lawrence. A Madonna and Child, probably Renaissance, is visible in photographs of the mid-twentieth century and is now gone. After years of neglect the chapel has been restored and reopened to worship.
What they did with the position
The family split in two: the Seghetto branch held Seghetto, Giubba and Spinel; the Umag branch held Rosazzo, Macalè — formerly Casoni — and Carsette.
| Who | When | What |
|---|---|---|
| Giacomo | 1808 | Member of the General Council of the Department of Istria |
| Giorgio | 1866 | A physician; volunteered with Garibaldi in the wars of the Risorgimento |
| Giovanni Battista, Francesco, Giacomo, Ettore | 1815–1918 | Between them, mayors of Umag for a century. Giovanni Battista was a scholar and a collector of unpublished manuscripts of the town's history — and, in Carlo's book, the deputy to the Imperial Council who supplied the Seget documents from his own family archive. |
| Dr Luigi | — | President of the Umag Philharmonic and of the Mutual Aid Society; councillor of the Congregation of Charity, the Rural Bank and the Cooperative Purchasing Society |
| Italo | — | An engineer. Built a brick works at Spinel that the Great War ruined, and designed and directed the church and campanile of Materada |
| Ettore and Ferramondo | 1918–1945 | Commissioners |
The house received the Venetian admiral Angelo Emo (1731–1792), who led the fleet to its last victories against the Barbary corsairs in 1769 and 1784, and Pietro Kandler, the father of Istrian historiography.
A newspaper feature, not a monograph — but written off the 2016 conservation survey and consistent at every checkable point with Carlo's own 1879 account and with Puhmajer's study. Its deep origins — Rome, a prefect against Odoacer, the move to Padua — are the family's own tradition as the nobiliary literature repeats it, and are printed here as that and nothing more.
Giovanni Battista in the Istrian Diet, January 1895
The Austrian National Library's newspaper archive was searched in September 2026 for the surname beside the name of this archive's own parish. Eight issues came back. The fullest is «Il giovine Pensiero» of Pola for 16 January 1895, which prints the stenographic record of the opening of the Provincial Diet of Istria at Parenzo — and a De Franceschi is running it.
Il signor capitano provinciale apre la seduta e concede la facoltà di parlare all'on. Giovanni Battista de Franceschi, che a nome della maggioranza intera così si esprime…
The provincial captain opens the session and gives the floor to the honourable Giovanni Battista de Franceschi, who speaks in the name of the entire majority. What he then says is that the events of the past year had so moved public opinion as to give the Italians of Istria occasion to raise before the Imperial Government their strongest complaints and most energetic protests at the unjust and partisan way they are treated in everything touching their national life.
What he does in that one sitting
- Elected one of the session's revisori — its tellers.
- Named to the Commissione politico-economica.
- A signatory of the interpellation asking how the Government justifies opening the Diet without having appointed a vice-president.
- A signatory of Dr Bubba's motion against the bilingual signs being put up in the Istrian district courts — the great language quarrel of the 1890s, and the motion says the Italians of Istria were offended in their rights by a Slavicisation «not requested by the Slavs living in the province» themselves.
- Acting as scrutatore in the election of a substitute assessor, where all twenty ballots carried one name.
- Speaking again for the majority, asking the Captain to use his good offices to persuade the assessors who had resigned to stay in post.
And on the same order paper, Gallignana
Among the bills before the session: «progetto di legge sull'istituzione dei nuovi Comuni locali di Pisino, Novacco, Lindaro, Terviso, Gallignana, Pedena» — a bill for the establishment of new local communes, this archive's own parish among them. In January 1895 the Diet of Istria was legislating Gračišće into a commune, and the man leading the majority in that chamber carried the surname.
And this is very probably the Seget man
Carlo's book of 1879 credits its Seget documents to «il sig. Giambattista de Franceschi deputato al Consiglio dell'Impero» — a deputy to the Imperial Council in Vienna, drawing on his own family archive. The 2020 feature on the estate lists among the mayors of Umag between 1815 and 1918 a Giovanni Battista, «studioso e collezionista di manoscritti inediti della storia umaghese» — a scholar and collector of unpublished manuscripts of the town's history. And here, in 1895, a Giovanni Battista de Franceschi leads the Italian majority of the Istrian Diet. Three sources, sixteen years apart, and on the face of it one man: the Umag branch in politics.
Stated as the likely reading, not a proven identity. The Diet report gives no patronymic and no place, and Giovanni Battista is the commonest name in every branch of this surname.
And in 1898 an obituary settles it
“«Il Popolo Istriano» of 17 September 1898 reports a society's annual meeting and its roll of members dead in the year. «Speciale menzione fa di Giov. Batt. de Franceschi, capo dei deputati italiani alla Dieta, uscito dalla patriotica famiglia di Seghetto, esempio di gentilezza e ospitalità; dice che sedette, soldato fedele alla consegna, lunghi anni nel Parlamento di Vienna, nella Dieta e nei Consigli delle principali nostre istituzioni, né tradì mai in nessun posto, neppur con l'ombra di un pensiero, quello che era il suo, quello che è il nostro ideale.»”
Special mention of Giovanni Battista de Franceschi, head of the Italian deputies in the Diet, **out of the patriotic family of Seghetto**, an example of courtesy and hospitality; he sat, a soldier faithful to his orders, long years in the Parliament of Vienna, in the Diet and in the councils of our principal institutions, and never in any post betrayed, not even by the shadow of a thought, what was his ideal and is ours.
That closes the identification this archive had left open. The man leading the Italian majority of the Istrian Diet in 1895 is the Seget man — «uscito dalla patriotica famiglia di Seghetto» — and the «Parlamento di Vienna» is exactly the Consiglio dell'Impero to which Carlo's book of 1879 says «il sig. Giambattista de Franceschi deputato al Consiglio dell'Impero» belonged, when he handed Carlo the Seget documents out of his own family archive. Same man, three sources, nineteen years apart. He died in 1898.
And in «Il giovine Pensiero» of 19 January 1895 he signs the majority's resolution not as a member but as its chair: «G. B. de Franceschi mp. presidente, Dr. Becich mp. segretario».
«Il giovine Pensiero», Pola, 16 January 1895, pages 1–2. ANNO ID igp18950116; images from the ONB's IIIF service. The issue carries nine occurrences of the two search terms and they are all in this report.
They ran Umago for a hundred years
Found in Rino Cigui's «Contributo all'araldica di Umago», in the «Atti» of Rovigno, volume 24 of 1994. Under Venice the town had a Venetian rector sent out yearly — Balbi, Corner, Priuli, Bembo, Barozzi, a Salamon in 1764. Then Venice fell, and the town began electing its own. Cigui lists them.
| 1 | Giacomo Mitrovich (Pastovichio) | |
| 2 | Francesco de Franceschi | the first of the family |
| 3 | Bernardo Alessandri | |
| 4 | Pietro Manzutto | |
| 5 | Giuseppe Roselli | |
| 6 | Dott. Giacomo de Franceschi di Seghetto | «of Seghetto» — the manor this page is about |
| 7 | Giov. Batt. de Franceschi di Seghetto | «of Seghetto» |
| 8 | Ettore de Franceschi di Umago | the last mayor before 1918 |
Eight mayors between 1815 and 1918, and four of them De Franceschi. Cigui adds that under Austria a mayor was re-elected repeatedly and stayed in office for many years, so eight men cover the century between them. Two are given in the list by the name of the estate: «di Seghetto».
And it did not stop in 1918. Of the three commissari who governed Umago under Italy, two were De Franceschi — Ettore again, and a Ferramondo de Franceschi. A Luigi de Franceschi appears later among the nine prefectural commissioners. The family was in the town hall, on and off, from the fall of Venice to the Second World War.
And one of them wrote the town's history
From Cigui's edition of Pietro Kandler's «Cenni storici di Umago» in the same journal, volume 34 of 2004: Kandler was among the first, «assieme al canonico Francesco Roselli ed a Giovanni Battista de Franceschi», to attempt a systematic reconstruction of Umago's past. The note on him reads: «Giovanni Battista de Franceschi, cultore di studi storici e autore della raccolta ‘Manoscritti inediti relativi alla Storia di Umago'. Fu podestà di Umago nella seconda metà dell'Ottocento.»
A collector of historical studies, author of a gathering of unpublished manuscripts on the history of Umago, and mayor of the town in the second half of the nineteenth century. This archive had already identified the Giovanni Battista de Franceschi who led the Italian majority in the Istrian Diet in January 1895 as the Seghetto man, on the strength of his 1898 obituary. Here he is again, from the other side: not only a politician but a working local historian with a manuscript collection to his name. Whether that collection survives, and where, is not known here.
And the woods they owned are still on the map
The Venetian cadastre of Verteneglio of 1775, edited in the «Atti» volume 22 of 1992, lists among the woods of the commune: «Bosco detto Capitania di Nicolò Franceschi e di Giure Turina», «Bosco detto Slavai del Signor Nicolò de Franceschi», and «Bosco alla Stanza detta Valentich di Nicolò Franceschi». At Matterada in 1775–76 a Nicolò Franceschi is one of five co-owners of a wood by Ive Ferletta's house.
The name stuck to the ground. A boundary description of 1819 walks the surveyor along «il fosso dividente sempre il Bosco de Franceschi dal bosco de consorti Coronica» to a tall stone marked F.F., and a study of Istrian wood-names in volume 23 of 1993 lists «Bosco de Franceschi a Verteneglio» among the standing toponyms of the province. A wood named for the family, on the register, half a century after Nicolò bought it.
Rino Cigui, «Contributo all'araldica di Umago», Atti vol. XXIV (1994); «Umago. Cenni storici di Pietro Kandler», Atti vol. XXXIV (2004), pp. 421–472; «La toponomastica del comune catastale di Verteneglio», Atti vol. XXII (1992), pp. 255–286; and the wood-name study in vol. XXIII (1993). All read from the Internet Archive copies, September 2026.
The house, the library, the band and the oxen
«La Ricerca», the bulletin of the Centro di ricerche storiche di Rovigno, ran a study of the noble estates of the Umago country in December 2004, built from the archives of Trieste, Pazin and Rijeka. Half of it is about this family. It is free on the Internet Archive, and nothing in it was in this archive.
«Nel 1674 la Repubblica di Venezia assegnò a Zorzi de Franceschi una pensione per i meriti avuti durante la guerra di Candia.» Zorzi de Franceschi was given a Venetian pension for his services in the War of Candia. After the Turkish conquest he went from Candia to Zante, and from Zante to Sebenico. A document of 1730 directs that the pension be drawn at Capodistria — «probabilmente perchè la famiglia viveva già a Seghetto». The French suspended the payment; the Austrians restored it. That is a hundred and fifty years of a Venetian war pension following one family from Crete to Istria.
«La tenuta di Seghetto era circondata da un alto muro in pietra.» An olive press, deep cellars, stables, granaries and a carriage house. A receipt of 1856 records that Luigi de Franceschi bought a carriage from Giacomo Feranda of Pisino for 260 florins.
«Nel palazzo, che con la sua grandezza domina tutta la tenuta, trovava posto una imponente biblioteca, che si dice di oltre 3.000 volumi.» A library of more than three thousand volumes, bought from booksellers at Trieste, Pirano, Buie and Parenzo. The article notes what sits with it: professors at Padua, agronomists, deputies to the parliament at Vienna, mayors of Umago, engineers.
«A Seghetto operava una banda d'ottoni, formata dai coloni. Questi venivano anche pagati per venire alle prove.» A brass band at Seghetto made up of the estate's own colonus tenants, who were paid to turn up to rehearsal. It is the same band that «Il Piccolo» of 2 August 1897 has playing the anthem of Trieste on the quay at Umago — «la banda di Seghetto, propri dei signori de Franceschi» — as the excursion steamer from Trieste came alongside under a triumphal arch reading «Viva i fratelli di Trieste. Uno per tutti, tutti per uno!»
They had many properties around Umago, among them Spinel, «dove avevano persino una fabbrica di mattoni. Su questi veniva impressa la scritta Franceschi - Umago». Also a house in Venice, the Cà Franceschi, which they let, and an estate at Spinea near Treviso.
Pietro Kandler, the father of Istrian historiography, was a visitor. The article lists what went from Seghetto to Trieste in 1849: oil, wine, wild birds in a basket, wild asparagus, fresh fruit, dead birds, fresh fish, herbs, vegetables and game. Kandler sent back veal, groceries, clothes, linen, a shotgun, books, vegetables, pasta, a jar of preserve, oysters, oranges, sweets and a hat.
From a deed of division of 1870, the cattle that Countess Marianna de Franceschi née Alessandri kept at Spinel. The oxen: Gagliardo, Gardelin, Ciarin, Brum, Cavron, Morea, Rumin, Napoli, Gelen and Boscarin. The cows: Russinca, Giagoda, Brunava, Rumina, Salvinca, Moscatella, Gardellina, Ciadina, Biancolina, Gajarda, Armellina and Sernella. Twenty-two animals, named, in a lawyer's paper about splitting an inheritance.
A nineteenth-century diploma of the Istituto Satollatorio Tonico Parentino — a gastronomes' club at Parenzo — praises the mutton cutlets cooked to the recipe of Giambatta dei Franceschi.
«Subito vicino c'è la tomba dei conti de Franceschi di Seghetto. Anche questa munita di stemma famigliare.» In the cemetery at Umago, next to the tomb of the counts Marcovich, is the tomb of the counts de Franceschi of Seghetto, and it carries the family arms. Another carved shield to photograph, and a second test of the blazon Carlo described privately to Kobler.
Still farming in the 1930s
«L'Istria Agricola», the province's farming paper, in 1934: Marco de Franceschi fu Nicolò, of Umago (Seghetto), is among the breeders awarded for good bull-calves and among the keepers of public stud stations. In the classified column of the same issue: «Presso i Fr.li de Franceschi, a Seghetto di Umago, sono in vendita due falciatrici meccaniche Osborne» — two Osborne mowers for sale at Seghetto. The brothers had a rubber stamp reading Fratelli de Franceschi, and «operavano come Fratelli de Franceschi al fine di non spezzettare» the estate — trading as the brothers so as not to break the property up.
And in 1927 the same paper buries a young agronomist, Guido Vardabasso, who had begun his career «facendo della buona pratica nelle tenute degli avi materni, i De Franceschi di Seghetto di Umago» — doing his practical training on the estates of his maternal forebears, the De Franceschi of Seghetto. Among the mourners: «l'ing. Italo de Franceschi, membro della Commissione Reale». That same Italo designed the road from the centre of Umago out to the hotels at Punta, probably as part of the tourism scheme shown at the Istrian provincial exhibition at Capodistria in 1910. Thirty years earlier it was the Franco and Vardabasso families of Buie who gave forty crowns to the Lega Nazionale to honour Giovanni Battista's memory; the two houses were joined by marriage.
«La morte di un patriota» — 25 November 1897
This archive confirmed Giovanni Battista de Franceschi as the Seghetto man from his obituary of 1898. «Il Piccolo» of Trieste had done it four months earlier and more plainly, in the notice of his death.
“L'Istria nostra è nuovamente in lutto: la morte le ha rapito un altro dei suoi cittadini più devoti: il conte Giambattista de' Franceschi di Seghetto, podestà di Umago. […] Al principio del 1895, quando tutta l'Istria attendeva dalla Dieta di Parenzo una energica voce di protesta contro le [insegne] bilingui alle sedi dei Giudizi, G. B. de' Franceschi si trovò a capo di quella maggioranza della Dieta, che con tanta nobiltà di linguaggio non disgiunta da virile energia, riaffermava l'italianità dell'Istria.”
Our Istria is in mourning again: death has taken from her another of her most devoted citizens, Count Giambattista de' Franceschi of Seghetto, podestà of Umago. […] At the beginning of 1895, when all Istria was waiting for a vigorous voice of protest from the Diet at Parenzo against the bilingual signs at the seats of the courts, G. B. de' Franceschi found himself at the head of that majority of the Diet which, with so much nobility of language and no less manly energy, reaffirmed the Italianness of Istria.
Three things at once. The title — «il conte», which the newspapers give him and this archive had not. The offices, listed: podestà of Umago, deputy to the provincial Diet and to the parliament at Vienna, director of the Lega Nazionale. And the identification, made explicit: the man leading the Diet majority in January 1895, whose speech this archive published from the stenographic record, is the Seghetto man. And in the same issue, the small thing: forty crowns to the Lega Nazionale «per onorare la memoria del compianto Giovanni Battista de Franceschi, dalle famiglie Franco e Vardabasso di Buie».
One correction to the timeline above, from the 1903 volume of the Atti e memorie della Società istriana. It says the family «trasferivasi in Istria nel 1669 ed acquistava dai Valier di Venezia la tenuta che essi nel 1623 avevano acquistata da Vincenzo Cuchich» — bought from the Valier, where this archive's timeline says Venier, and dates the purchase to the arrival rather than to 1720. The AMSI note is compressed and secondary; the timeline above follows Puhmajer, who worked from the deeds. The point of quoting it is that a third source, independently, puts this family's arrival in Istria in 1669 and out of Candia.
«La Ricerca», bollettino del Centro di ricerche storiche di Rovigno, nn. 42–43, December 2004 — the survey of the noble houses of the Umago country. «Il Piccolo» of Trieste, 2 August 1897 and 25 November 1897. «L'Istria Agricola», 15 February 1927 and 28 February 1934. Atti e memorie della Società istriana di archeologia e storia patria, 1903. All read from the Internet Archive copies, September 2026.
Eighteen years in the Vienna parliament, and a demand to annul his election
Daniela Simon's monograph on Istria between 1870 and 1914 tabulates who the Istrian Diet sent to the Reichsrat in Vienna, term by term. A de Franceschi is in three consecutive lists.
| 1873–1879 | «Johann de Franceschi (Nazario Stradi), Johann Paul de Polesini, Francesco Vidulich und Dinko Vitezić» |
| 1879–1885 | «Johann de Francesci, Jakob Lazarini (Peter Millevoi), Francesco Franz Vidulich und Dinko Vitezić» |
| 1885–1891 | «Johann de Franceschi, Peter Millevoi (Ludwig Rizzi), Franz Vidulich (Thomas Vergottini) und Dinko Vitezić» |
Three terms, eighteen years, in a delegation of four. Until now this archive could show him leading the Diet majority at Parenzo in January 1895 and being buried as «il conte Giambattista de' Franceschi di Seghetto, podestà di Umago» in November 1897. This puts him in Vienna from 1873.
And from 1873, the detail that says most about the argument he was in. The Italian side put up three candidates that year — Vidulich, De Franceschi and Kamalić — and Simon notes, from Naša Sloga, that «alle drei italienischen Kandidaten beherrschten nur Italienisch und im Gegensatz zu Vitezić kein gutes Deutsch»: all three spoke only Italian and, unlike their Croatian opponent Vitezić, no good German. They were standing for a parliament in Vienna.
And in 1885 the Croatian Party asked for his election to be voided
Simon gives a footnote on electoral practice — «Es existieren zahlreiche Beispiele für Wahlfälschungen, Stimmzettelkäufen und entsprechende Konflikte», numerous examples of falsified ballots, vote-buying and the conflicts that followed — and cites, as her instance, a detailed complaint by the Croatian Party about the rural-communes election in the Vodnjan district on 22 May 1885, naming the people involved. «Die Forderung nach Annullierung der Wahl von G. B. De Franceschi wurde an das Abgeordnetenhaus gerichtet» — the demand that G. B. De Franceschi's election be annulled was addressed to the Chamber of Deputies.
And Simon gives the shape of what an Istrian election meant in that year. At Poreč in May 1885 there were «schwere Auseinandersetzungen und Tätlichkeiten zwischen slawischen und italienischen Wählern» — serious confrontations and assaults: the Italian voters, politicians and the electoral commission pressed the Slav voters, tried to buy their votes, prevented them from voting and physically attacked them. The district captain witnessed it. The police did not intervene. The injured complained to the Chamber of Deputies in Vienna. At Vodnjan, «kam es zu massiven Wahlbehinderungen und zu Stimmenkäufen» — massive obstruction of the vote and vote-buying. Vodnjan is the district in which G. B. de Franceschi's election was contested.
The complaint is a complaint, not a finding; he served the term. But it is worth having on this page next to the death notice that calls him a knight who defended the cause of Istria openly. Both are true statements about the same election, made by the two sides of it, and the file that would settle what actually happened at Vodnjan on 22 May 1885 is named, numbered and sitting in Trieste.
One more thing from Simon, on the Lega Nazionale that G. B. directed. Founded in 1891 and working in the ethnically mixed parts of the Littoral, it funded schools, kindergartens and scholarships. The contemporary socialist Angelo Vivante called it a «Denationalisateurin» — a denationaliser — and Simon's summary is that through it the Italian Party pursued in practice the assimilation that Benussi, Combi, Luciani and Carlo De Franceschi had justified in print. Two men of this surname, at the two ends of Istria, on the same programme.
Daniela Simon, «Die bedrohte Ordnung der Vielfalt. Kulturelle Hybridität in Istrien, 1870–1914», transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2024, open access — read in full text, September 2026.
The house, photographed — and the shield in its pediment
This page has been built out of Puhmajer's monograph, a Venetian pension file, a cadastral map of 1818 and a run of Istrian newspapers. The family has now stood in front of the building and photographed it, including the thing at the top of it that nobody here had seen.
A three-storey block under a broad triangular pediment, far larger than the word «stanzia» suggests — a palazzo with a farm behind it. The front is faced in dressed stone with heavy quoining at the angles and flat giant pilasters running up through two storeys; shuttered windows in three ranges; a low arched doorway on the centre line; lower wings to either side. In the pediment, two small square attic windows with a carved stone rosette set in a lozenge beside each. Cars are parked against the front of it. It is somebody's building, still standing, still in use.
A carved cartouche in high relief, framed in scrolled and rolled mantling with volutes turning outward at the corners, one of them broken away at the lower right. At the centre, an oval shield, and on the shield a beast rampant — rearing, in profile, on a field that reads as horizontal hatching. The carving is weathered but the charge is unmistakable: a single rampant animal, and on the reading here a lion.
This archive's arms page turns on a description Carlo De Franceschi gave privately to Kobler about 1873 — a Greek cross crossed by two arrows above, a pomegranate below, a plumed helm over the shield — and on the Blasonario, which lists four separate families of this surname in the region. The first bears a stork on a mount of three peaks; the second bears a lion; the third is Carlo's cross and pomegranate; the fourth, at Pisino, a half-castle and a pomegranate. The shield on the Seget pediment carries a lion. It is the second family, not the third.
That is worth more than a decorative note. This archive has argued from documents that the Seget house and the Gologorica house are two different families of one surname — Seget out of Candia in 1669 by way of Zante and Sebenico, with a Venetian war pension; Gologorica out of Carnia around 1700, artisans who bought land and were written down as «D.no». The two houses put two different coats of arms on their façades. Whatever else that proves, it proves that they thought so too.
And it sharpens the errand at the other end. There is a «blasone sulla facciata» on the Defranceschi palazzetto at Gologorica, recorded by Radmila Matejčić in 1979 and described by the American branch in 2012 as worn almost past reading. One of the two shields has now been photographed. The other has not.
And a correction, from the monograph this page rests on
Petar Puhmajer's «Stancija de Franceschi u Segetu kod Umaga» (Zagreb, 2019) is the source behind the timeline at the top of this page, and it was read properly only after the photographs above had been described. It dates the front of the house, and the correction matters. The main façade as it now stands — the giant pilasters running through three storeys, the attic zone, and «veliki profilirani zabat s grbom obitelji de Franceschi», the great moulded pediment with the de Franceschi family arms — belongs to the classicist rebuilding of 1843 to 1845. It is not eighteenth-century work. Of the original building Puhmajer says only the outer walls of the main wing and some internal cross-walls survive; the stone windows, portals and pilasters were all inserted in that rebuild.
So the shield in the pediment is a coat of arms of the 1840s, and the shield in the ironwork of the tomb at Umag is dated 1890. Both are nineteenth-century. The shield on the house at Gologorica is on an eighteenth-century façade. They remain two different coats of arms used by two families of one surname, which is the point that mattered — but they are not contemporaries, and this page should not have implied that they were.
Puhmajer also records a second shield here, and it is empty. On the keystone of the arched stone portal in the high wall between the palace and the oil press there is a carved cartouche, and his footnote reads: «Na grbu izostaje heraldičko znakovlje vlasnika pa je, po svemu sudeći, ono bilo naslikano» — the owner's heraldic charge is absent from the shield, so it was evidently painted on. Somewhere on that estate is a blank stone that used to carry these arms in colour.
And one caution for anyone reading the photographs. The south façade of the east wing carries star-shaped ornaments — but they are not heraldry. Puhmajer describes them as «ukras u obliku zvijezde na žbuci, načinjen od ljuštura školjaka», star ornaments modelled in the plaster out of sea shells, part of the same 1840s scheme as the rusticated blocks and the rosette medallions in the window aprons. A star at Seget is as likely to be shellwork as a charge.
Two of the dates in the timeline above also need reading with Puhmajer's caution. The 1724 keystone is on the portal between the oil press and a former colonate house — and since the oil press was built in the first half of the nineteenth century, he assumes the portal was moved there from somewhere else. The building this page calls a manor was, in the eighteenth century, something plainer than the front it now wears.
Photographed by the family at Seget near Umag, 2026: the front of the house, an oblique view of the stonework and doorway, the pediment entire, and the cartouche in close-up. The blazon above is a reading of a weathered carving from those photographs, not a herald's determination.
The tomb at Umag, and the arms on it
This archive put an item on its research log this morning: «La Ricerca» of 2004 says there is a tomb of the counts de Franceschi of Seghetto in the cemetery at Umag, «munita di stemma famigliare», and a photograph of it would be worth having. The photograph arrived the same day. The family went and stood in front of it.
Not a headstone: a walled burial enclosure with its own iron railings and a flight of steps up to a gate, and inside it a canopy — a semicircular stone arch carried on four columns, with a wrought-iron cross and two kneeling angels on the crown of it. The arch is filled with a black-painted iron tympanum of scrolling acanthus. Cypresses behind. It is the most substantial thing this archive has photographed anywhere.
Held in the scrollwork, a shield surmounted by a five-pointed coronet, and on the shield a lion rampant with a five-pointed star beside it. That is the achievement, in iron, at eye level, sharp and unweathered. It is the same charge as the worn cartouche in the pediment of the house at Seget, and it settles the reading of that one.
The Blasonario lists four families of this surname in the region: one with a stork on a mount of three peaks, one with a lion, one with Carlo's Greek cross, two arrows and a pomegranate, and one at Pisino with a half-castle. The Seghetto house and the Seghetto tomb both carry the lion. Whatever the documents say about Candia in 1669 and Carnia around 1700, the two families were using two different coats of arms and meant it.
Marble, in three arched bays divided by fluted columns, pine-cone finials over each. The outer bays carry a carved inverted torch apiece. Over the centre bay, a carved wreath with ribbons enclosing the date 1890 — the year the tomb was built. And on the centre panel, cut plainly: FAMIGLIA DE FRANCESCHI DI SEGHETTO.
Five names on the tablet
| Name | As cut | What we know of them |
|---|---|---|
| Francesca de Franceschi | aged 77, died 1 January 1924 | Born about 1847. |
| Rag. Giorgio de Franceschi | aged 26, died 4 February 1940 | «Rag.» — ragioniere, an accountant. Born about 1913 and dead at twenty-six. |
| Ing. Italo de Franceschi | aged 68, died 3 December 1944 | Born about 1876. The engineer: member of the Royal Commission for the Province of Istria, present at Guido Vardabasso's funeral at Capodistria in 1927, and the man who laid out the road from the centre of Umag to the hotels at Punta. |
| Ferramondo de Franceschi | aged 74, died 12 December 1945 | Born about 1871. One of the three commissari who governed Umag under Italy between 1918 and 1945. He died in the December after the war ended, as the Italian population of the town began to leave. |
| Anna Fragiacomo, widow de Franceschi | aged 70, died 27 August 1960 | Born about 1890. She outlived the rest by fifteen years and was buried there in 1960, long after the exodus. Hers is the last name on the stone. |
Those five are not on the monument. They are on a separate marble tablet standing against the wall in the corner of the enclosure, beside the tomb of the Favretto — Giacomo Favretto 1849–1911 and Nicoletta Favretto Piccoli 1850–1918, with a Giovanni Battista Favretto who died in August 1918 aged seventy-five. The De Franceschi tablet is propped, not fixed.
And elsewhere in the same cemetery, on a rendered wall that is losing its plaster in sheets, a small white plate with a black cross and three lines: FAMIGLIA ETTORE DE FRANCESCHI. Ettore is the eighth and last of the elected mayors of Umag between 1815 and 1918, and one of the three commissari after it. He has his own wall.
What this adds. The archive already knew, from Cigui's list and from «L'Istria Agricola», that Ettore was mayor, that Ferramondo was a commissario, and that Italo sat on the Royal Commission and designed a road. It had no dates for any of them. It now has the day and the age for four generations of the house, from a Francesca born about 1847 to an Anna Fragiacomo buried in 1960, and it has the family's own arms in iron, made about 1890 and still there. That is a research-log item opened and closed inside a day, and closed by somebody going and looking.
Photographed by the family at the Umag cemetery, 2026: the enclosure, the canopy, the ironwork shield in close-up, the marble monument, the 1890 wreath, the inscribed tablet and the Ettore wall plate. Transcriptions above are from those photographs.
Reading Puhmajer properly, and two sentences nobody had noticed
Petar Puhmajer's monograph on this house has been the source behind the timeline at the top of this page since the beginning, and until this week only eleven lines had been taken out of it. It has now been read end to end — seventy-five pages of Croatian, with an English summary that leaves out most of what matters. Two sentences in the footnotes change what this family is.
«Alvise de Franceschi (1727. – oko 1790.) u rodoslovlju se navodi kao Dragomai alla Porta ottomana, a bio je oženjen Francescom Borella, s kojom je imao šestoro djece.» — Alvise de Franceschi, 1727 to about 1790, is entered in the genealogy as Dragoman at the Ottoman Porte, and was married to Francesca Borella, with whom he had six children. A Venetian dragomanno alla Porta was a salaried interpreter-diplomat of the bailo at Constantinople: a real office, with its own archival series in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, and one that Venice filled from Levantine-Greek families who had served her in the East. The man who held Seget through the second half of the eighteenth century was a Venetian diplomat in Turkey. Puhmajer names it once, in a footnote, and never returns to it.
Marc'Antonio de Franceschi (1671–1758), civil and military physician, who bought the estate in 1720 with his brother Nicolò and took Seget as his share, married in 1727 «Crissulla Marulli» and had eleven children by her. Crissulla is Chrysoula. Marulli is a Cretan noble surname. This archive has carried the family's flight from Candia in 1669 as a tradition with no document behind it — Puhmajer himself sources it only to an encyclopaedia. He then names the purchaser's Greek wife and moves on without comment. She is the best evidence in the book for where these people came from.
The finding aid to the Rijeka fond is titled «Sumarni inventar arhivskog fonda RO 23: Obitelj de Franceschi iz Šegeta (Seghetto) 1412 / 1943». Fourteen twelve. Three hundred years before the family reached Istria. And inside it, in box 1, is the «Albero genealogico della Famiglia de Franceschi» of 1896, which Puhmajer says runs «iz vremena koje seže u 15. stoljeće» — from a time reaching back into the fifteenth century — down to the 1890s, with dates, occupations and spouses. He prints perhaps a fifth of it in footnotes and reproduces the rest as a photograph too small to read.
Seven generations, from his footnotes
| Who | Married | What the book gives |
|---|---|---|
| Giorgio de Franceschi | — | Father of the two purchasers. Nothing else known. |
| Marc'Antonio (1671–1758) and Nicolò | m. Crissulla Marulli, 1727 | The brothers who bought from Catarina Bernardo Venier in 1720; Seget fell to Marc'Antonio's share. He was a civil and military physician, and his initials are the MA·F on the cistern head of 1732. Eleven children: Giorgio, Nicolò, Cristina, Giov. Battista, Vittorio, Palissena, Maria, Lugrezia, Alvise, Angelo, Caterina. |
| Alvise (1727 – c. 1790) | m. Francesca Borella | «Dragomai alla Porta ottomana». Held Seget through the later eighteenth century. Six children: Nicolò, Dorotea, Giacomo, Marc'Antonio, Giov. Battista, Angelo. His brother Nicolò was an advocate at Koper and died there in 1792 without heirs; his brother Angelo's family settled at Verteneglio. |
| Marc'Antonio (1767–1832) | m. Eufemia Bruni, 1785 | Owner of the dwelling house in 1819. Eight children, of whom four reached adulthood. |
| Dr Luigi (1786–1878) | — | «Dottore Luigi». Ran the estate's business, professor at the University of Padua and later a member of its Academy, friend of Pietro Kandler, and the man who built the library — reckoned the richest in Istria. At his death the papers show he owned no significant real property of his own. |
| Giorgio (1788 – 30 March 1865) | m. Marianna Alessandri, 1806 | The patron of the classicist rebuild of 1843–45 — the front of the house as it now stands. Four children: Eufemia, Maria, Marc'Antonio, Giacomo. |
| Marc'Antonio (1811–1850) | m. Maria de Franceschi di Nicolò, 1835 | A marriage inside the surname. Seven children: Giorgio, Luigi, Marianna, Giov. Battista, Nicolò, Ida, Dot. Giacomo. His widow appears in the 1865 inventory as a neighbouring proprietor, «la Sig.a Maria Vedova de Franceschi». |
| The five brothers | — | Giacomo, Luigi, Giambattista, Nicolò and Giorgio inherited the whole property after their grandmother died last in 1852. Only Giorgio lived in Umag; the rest at Seget. Giacomo Gobbi Belcredi was received by three of them there in 1895. |
| Nicolò (1844–1896) | m. Teresa d'Ambrosi | Nine children: Giuseppina, Ida Beatrice, Giovanni Battista, Valeria, Evelina, Marcella, Maria, Marco, Luigi. |
| Giorgio (1836–1885) | m. Francesca Picciola | Four children: Faramondo, Gualtiero, Italo, Attilia — and there are the Ferramondo and Italo of the tomb at Umag. |
| Italo | — | Civil engineer. Laid out the road from Umag to the hotel at Punta and drew the plans shown at the First Regional Exhibition for Istria at Koper in 1910 for turning Punta dei Moro and Valle Lunga into a bathing resort. Reported to have built the brick factory at Spinel and designed the church and bell tower at Materada. |
One caution the archive should carry: Puhmajer's footnote 23 gives Marc'Antonio (1767–1832) four sisters — Caterina, Bianca, Margherita, Francesca — who are, by his own footnote 20, that man's own daughters. The footnote has duplicated a generation. Discard those sisters until the 1896 chart is read.
Five corrections to the timeline at the top of this page
| The 1732 well-head | It is not a well. It is the «šterna», the rainwater cistern in the main courtyard — an artificial mound over a brick-vaulted chamber divided in two by arched openings, with a carved stone head and an iron grille. The estate had a separate well, the «pozzo alla Noghera», and another listed in 1843. And the inscription is «now barely legible»: the reading of 1732 and MA·F is Iva Perčić's, taken from a photograph in 1954. |
| The 1724 portal | It stands between the oil mill and a former colonate house — and the oil mill was not built until about 1841. Puhmajer concludes the portal was moved there, and suggests it may originally have stood at the entrance to the owners' own dwelling. |
| The 1790 division | It was 1790 and 1791, and the estate was divided «per quinto» — into five shares. The five numbered lots survive, each coming to about 330 florins, assembled room by room across the whole house. Alvise had six children and one daughter, so five sons and five shares. |
| The Cretan flight | Puhmajer's only authority for 1669 is Dario Alberi's encyclopaedia of 2001. He produces no document, and he never cites Carlo De Franceschi's statement of 1879. The Cretan origin should be carried as tradition — well-supported tradition, given Crissulla Marulli — until the 1896 chart is read. |
| 1945 | Extend it. «De Franceschijevi su živjeli u Segetu još 1946. godine, a nakon toga su preselili u Italiju» — they were still living at Seget in 1946, and moved to Italy after that. |
And what happened to the house. Nationalised, and assigned to the agricultural combine PIK Umag, whose workers moved into the palace; their descendants live in it still. The library and the family archive went first to Buje, then in 1953 to the historical archive at Rijeka, with part of the books ending in the university libraries of Rijeka and Pula. The oil mill was destroyed shortly after 1997. When PIK went bankrupt the complex passed to the town of Umag, which let the tenants buy their flats — legalising, in the process, every twentieth-century partition wall cut through the painted rooms.
One last thing, and it is the closest the book comes to putting a De Franceschi's own intention on record. The library catalogue of 1881 lists five books on architecture, and one of them is Palladio — «Dell'Architettura», Venice 1711. Puhmajer's argument is that Giorgio chose the Palladian solution himself, out of his own shelves; and that the arms sit in the pediment because Palladio wrote that a pediment is the perfect place for the patron's arms, «koji se obično stavljaju na sredinu pročelja». The man who rebuilt this house in the 1840s had the book open in front of him.
Petar Puhmajer, «Stancija de Franceschi u Segetu kod Umaga», Mala biblioteka Godišnjaka zaštite spomenika kulture Hrvatske sv. 20, Ministarstvo kulture RH, Zagreb 2019 — read in full, September 2026. The PDF is free from the Ministry of Culture. Behind it stands an unpublished conservation report of at least five hundred pages: Puhmajer, Braut and Pedišić, «Umag. Stancija Seget. Elaborat konzervatorsko-restauratorskih istraživanja», Hrvatski restauratorski zavod, Zagreb 2016.
Umag, in the rain: five names on a loose slab, and an empty plot with a name on the wall
The tomb of the Seget branch in the cemetery at Umag has been on this site as an architectural object — the canopy on four columns, the wrought-iron tympanum, «FAMIGLIA DE FRANCESCHI DI SEGHETTO» over a wreath enclosing 1890. Forty-five photographs taken in the rain add what a photograph of the front never showed: where the people actually are, and that it is not one plot but two.
It is a loose marble slab, unbedded, standing propped against a low wall in a separate grass plot at the back, side by side with a second and larger loose slab. Neither is fixed. Both could be moved, broken or lost, and the archive can now say where they stood in the autumn of 2026 and no more than that.
«FRANCESCA DE FRANCESCHI, d'anni 77, morta 1 · I · 1924. — Rag. GIORGIO DE FRANCESCHI, d'anni 26, morto 4 · II · 1940. — Ing. ITALO DE FRANCESCHI, d'anni 68, morto 3 · XII · 1944. — FERAMONDO DE FRANCESCHI, d'anni 74, morto 12 · XII · 1945. — FRAGIACOMO ANNA, ved. DE FRANCESCHI, d'anni 70, morta 27 · VIII · 1960.» No heading above the first name and clear marble below the last. Rag. is ragioniere, an accountant; Ing. is ingegnere. Giorgio was twenty-six.
This site publishes the family's own origin legend from «La Voce del Popolo» — that they descend from a Ferramondo de Franceschi who fought Odoacer and withdrew to Padua after 476 — and notes that the name was still being given to sons of the house in the twentieth century. Here is one of them, and his stone spells it with a single R. The legend's Ferramondo is Pharamond of the Franks. The man who died at Umag five days before Christmas 1945, aged seventy-four, was Feramondo.
«IN MEMORIA DEI CONIUGI GIACOMO FAVRETTO, nato il 7 ottobre 1849, morto il 21 febbraio 1911, e di NICOLETTA FAVRETTO n. PICCIOLA, nata il 17 febbraio 1850, morta il 30 maggio 1911. UNA PRECE.» And below: «A GIOVANNI BATT. FAVRETTO, d'anni 75, † ai 21-9-1918. NICCEFORA FAVRETTO, d'anni 85, † ai 6-5-192[8].» Husband and wife dead within fifteen weeks of each other in 1911. Why a Favretto stele stands propped against the same wall as the De Franceschi tablet is not answered by anything on either stone.
Immediately west of the canopy tomb is another walled enclosure. It has no monument, no kerb, no stone — grass, and a wall whose render is pocked with dozens of empty sockets where fixings and plaques have been taken off. On the wall, an arched iron plate: «✝ FAMIGLIA ETTORE DE FRANCESCHI». A named plot with nothing in it that says who lies there. The cemetery office's burial register is now the only record.
One heraldic note, and it matters for the arms page. The wrought-iron tympanum over the tomb carries a shield charged with a lion rampant and a five-pointed star, under a coronet of five trefoil-tipped rays. The carved cartouche on the pediment of the Stancija at Seget carries a beast rampant on a field of close parallel lines — and no star. The Gologorica house and tomb carry something else entirely: a cross crossed by two arrows in saltire, above a pomegranate. Three carvings, and the Seget-Umag arms are not the Gologorica arms. Whether the star at Umag in 1890 was a later addition to the Seget shield or has simply weathered off the house is not answerable from photographs of a surface this eroded.
A firm negative to record, because the archive has been carrying two objects it has never seen. In forty-five frames covering the whole front elevation, the pediment and its cartouche, the arched portal, the flank doorcase and the attic frieze of the Stancija, there is no lettering anywhere: no date on the tympanum, none on the portal — which has no keystone at all — and a blank lintel on the flank. The dark line above the front arch, which had looked like carving, is a hanging cable. And no well-head appears in any frame. So the 1732 well with «M A · F» and the 1724 portal date, both of which this archive holds from the literature, are not disproved — they are simply not photographed. The ground in front of the house is now a car park; if the well survives it is behind or beside.
Photographed by the family at Seget and in the cemetery at Umag, autumn 2026, in rain, and read frame by frame with every doubtful word cropped and enlarged. Fourteen of the forty-five frames contain living people and are held back under this site's living-persons rule.
Seget and Umag, photographed
Forty-five frames from the family's visit in 2026 — the house at Seget, and the tomb at Umag with the arms that are not this archive's arms. Seven of them are published here; the rest have living people in them and are left out.
The lunette is the point. A lion rampant beneath a star, under a coronet, in gilt on blue — against the cross crossed by two arrows over a pomegranate that is cut twice in the cemetery at Gologorica. Two families of one surname, forty kilometres and one international border apart, and neither of them ever used the other's arms.
The house itself, dated — and a generation this archive did not have
The Cretan story on this page is genealogy, and genealogy is the weakest thing here. The building is the strongest. Seget was surveyed in 2016 by the Hrvatski restauratorski zavod — Petar Puhmajer with Ivan Braut and Anđelko Pedišić — and the conservation report reads the estate as a document: it dates the phases, names the patrons, and finds the builder's own initials cut in stone.
The site was lived on in antiquity and probably through the Middle Ages, and at the beginning of the seventeenth century it took in refugees from the Ottoman advance in Dalmatia — which is what the whole of this coast was doing. By 1623 it «došla je u posjed mletačke obitelji Venier», came into the possession of the Venetian Venier family. This archive has carried a disagreement here: its own timeline said Venier, while the 1903 volume of the *Atti e memorie* said the estate was bought from the Valier. The Istrian encyclopaedia's entry, working from the property record rather than a compressed footnote, says Venier. Corrected September 2026. The Umag parish's own book on its sacred art has the villa passing to the De Franceschi in 1720 «ranije vlasništvo Katarine Bernardo Valier» — formerly the property of Katarina Bernardo Valier, with a Christian name attached. Two sources now read Valier and one reads Venier, so this site follows Valier and records the encyclopaedia as the outlier. The first reading was too quick.
Two inscriptions on the fabric, and neither is in any pedigree: «1724» cut on the courtyard portal, and «1732» with the initials «MA. F.» on the cistern. Marc'Antonio Franceschi, on his own well-head, four years after the portal. The family bought in 1720; twelve years later the founder was putting his monogram on the water supply. That is the closest thing this archive has to Gologorica's ANNO · DOMNI · 1711 — the same instinct, a hundred kilometres and one social class apart.
In the eighteenth century, wine: two long single-storey *konobe* flanking the entrance court, built to hold it. By the early nineteenth the trade had turned to olive oil, and about 1840 the estate got an oil mill, stables and housing for the workers. The family is credited in the Istrian literature with introducing modern agricultural methods on the Bujština, and the house held a substantial library. This is a working farm that happens to have a palace on it, and the sequence of its outbuildings is the sequence of what Istria could sell.
A name this archive has never printed, and he is the one who made the house look the way it looks. The great rebuilding of 1843–1845 was his: a full staircase block thrown along the eastern front, and over it a classicist façade articulated with rows of stone windows, two pilasters and a pediment. The interiors were frescoed by the painter Michele Urban. A library wing was afterwards added onto the staircase block to form the east range. The models are the Palladian villas of the Veneto and Friuli, and the conservation report is careful about the authorship: «autora projekta obnove iz 1840-ih godina valja tražiti u krugu arhitekata djelatnih u Trstu» — the architect of the 1840s rebuilding is to be looked for among those practising at Trieste.
Set beside all that, the flight from Candia is the least documented thing on this page and the most repeated. What is documented, and heavily, is a physician who bought an estate in 1720, cut his initials on its cistern in 1732 and had eleven children by a Cretan wife; and a great-grandson who rebuilt the whole front of the house in the 1840s in the manner of Trieste. The Cretan origin is carried here as tradition with two good props — the Venetian war pension of 1674 followed from Candia to Capodistria, and Chrysoula Marulli's surname — and it will stay tradition until the family's own 1896 descent chart is read.
Petar Puhmajer, Ivan Braut and Anđelko Pedišić, «Umag, Stancija Seget: elaborat konzervatorsko-restauratorskih istraživanja», Hrvatski restauratorski zavod, 2016, through the Croatian art-history database DONART of the University of Rijeka and the bibliographic record at bib.irb.hr; and the Istrian encyclopaedia (Istrapedia) entry «Seget / Seghetto». Read 8 September 2026.
The chapel in the house, the library, and a coat of arms nineteen years too early
Sergije Jelenić's «Sakralno bogatstvo Umaga i okolice» — the sacred art of Umag and its surroundings — arrived as a 168-megabyte scan with no text in it at all. It was put through optical character recognition in September 2026, and it has a section on Seget and a sentence about a painting that this archive has to think about.
«Umag ne može zaobići obitelj De Franceschi, bilo onih koji su živjeli u Umagu, bilo onih koji su uz veliko gospodarstvo živjeli u Segetu, u vili iz osamnaestog stoljeća» — Umag cannot pass over the De Franceschi family, both those who lived in Umag and those who lived on the great estate at Seget, in an eighteenth-century villa. Seget is fifteen hundred metres from Umag, in the middle of the vineyards, on the left of the road to Novigrad.
«Ta vila već g. 1720. prelazi u vlasništvo De Franceschija (ranije vlasništvo Katarine Bernardo Valier)» — the villa passes into De Franceschi ownership already in 1720, formerly the property of Katarina Bernardo Valier. This archive settled the Venier–Valier question for Venier on the strength of the Istrian encyclopaedia, and recorded the 1903 *Atti e memorie* note as the odd one out. That was too quick. Two sources now say Valier, and this one gives a Christian name and a patronymic. The balance has moved, and this site moves with it: the vendor of 1720 is recorded here as Katarina Bernardo Valier, with Venier noted as the encyclopaedia's reading.
«u njoj imali vrlo bogatu knjižnicu» — in it they had a very rich library. Which is exactly what the Nobile volume reports from the other end: its author, reading in the Provincial Library's holdings, kept coming across the ex libris «De Franceschi – Seghetto». The books were real, they were many, and some of them are now on public shelves in Istria.
«kao što je bio običaj, obiteljsku kapelu» — and, as was the custom, a family chapel. It is to the right of the entrance to the villa, with its own door, and from outside you can see only a small apse. Inside it is very plain: a small wooden altar; an altarpiece of the Assumption of the Virgin with St Anthony and St Catherine; a second canvas, very old and valuable, of St Lucy; and a fine wooden cupboard built into the wall. It was restored in the 1990s, and Mass is said in it once a year, on Easter Monday — the same day as at the church of St Peregrine. A private chapel in a family house that is still opened one morning a year.
In the parish church of Umag hangs a large canvas of 1650, Our Lady of the Rosary with St Dominic and St Catherine, ringed with fifteen smaller pictures for the fifteen mysteries. «Čak je i ime autora slike, ali je teško čitljivo. Tu je i grb obitelji De Franceschija iz Umaga» — the painter's name is there but hard to read; and the arms of the De Franceschi family of Umag are on it. 1650 is nineteen years before the flight from Candia. So one of three things is true: the arms were added to the painting later, by the family, once they had arrived and were paying for its upkeep — which is the commonest reason a donor's arms appear on an older picture; or there were De Franceschi at Umag before 1669, which would mean the Cretan family arrived to a place where the name was already; or the picture's date is wrong. This archive cannot say which, and it is not going to guess. What it can say is that the earliest physical trace of the name at Umag is dated before the tradition allows, and that is worth knowing.
Sergije Jelenić, «Sakralno bogatstvo Umaga i okolice» / «The Sacred Treasury of Umag and its Surroundings», parallel Croatian and English text, 135 pages. Supplied as an image-only scan by the family; put through optical character recognition on this project's machine in September 2026, and the resulting text filed in the library beside it.
The full bibliography, with what each source gave and where it is weak →