Mignaty, Marguerite Albana, 1821-1887 Margherita Albana was born in Corfu, then a British protectorate, to Demetrio Albana and Caterina di Niccolò Palatino, the elder sister of two brothers. Her date of birth is uncertain: according to Angelo De Gubernatis, it was around 1827; for Edouard Schuré it was in 1831. The two biographers, however, linked to her by intense romantic relationships are not reliable. Her maternal aunt, Nina Palatianò, married an English gentleman, Sir Frederick Adam, high commissioner for the Ionian Islands, and together they were able to adopt their niece. They took her with them to India, where they stayed between 1832 and 1837, the period in which Adam was the governor of Madras.
After the family moved to Rome, she met Giorgio Mignaty, a painter originally from Cephalonia, and married him in the early 1840s, settling with him in various Italian cities, including Venice and, eventually, around 1844-45, in Florence.
The couple had three children: two, Demetrio Federick and Elena, died at eighteen months (1846) and five years (1853) respectively. The other, Aspasia, was an amateur painter and remained close to her mother until her passing. Margherita wrote and spoke fluent English, French, Greek, and Italian; she inserted herself easily into Florentine social and worldly; her salon in Via Larga (later Via Cavour) was a meeting point for foreigners and intellectuals passing through the city. Among the many exponents of the local liberal elite who constituted a point of contact between the moderate right and a more mobile and vast area of opinion were Ubaldino Peruzzi, Francesco Dall’Ongaro, Angelo De Gubernatis. Margherita was a friend and confidant of the historian Pasquale Villari, and became a writer in the very years in which Villari obtained the Chair of Modern History in Florence.
During the years of unification, Margherita fervently supported the Italian cause, writing popular Florentine correspondence for The Daily News from 1859 to 1866. As a Greek noblewoman writing from Florence in favour of Italian independence, she embodied the romantic myth of the nation in the eyes of English public opinion, thanks to an ideal unification of Greece, for which Byron had died fighting.
In her correspondence, she gave an account of political events, expressing favourable expressions of the spirit and the character of the Italian people, to correct the negative opinion of English readers. She was the first to publish the state of public education in Italy, writing for Rivista di Firenze (Florence Magazine), run by Atto Vannucci, about fellow countrymen Shelley and Byron.
In 1865, she printed “a historical sketch illustrative of the life and times of Dante Alighieri, with an outline of the legendary history of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise previous to the Divina Commedia” (A. Bertini, Florence 1865).
She was interested in the works of Wagner and wrote “Le theatre de Beyrouth et la Reforme musicale de R. Wagner” (“The Beirut Theatre and the Musical Reform of R. Wagner”) (1873), where she explained the philosophical as much as the technical side of the composer’s work. In line with her interests in Italy’s history and with the English taste for its Renaissance past, she dedicated her “sketches of the historical past of Italy” (Bentley, London 1876) to Lord Gladstone.
Also dating back from the sixties was her intense relationship with Edouard Schuré, the Alsatian philosopher with whom she shared a passion for Wagner’s music, Italian art and occultism. Schuré dedicated a chapter to her in his “Donne Ispiratrici” (“Inspirational Women”) (Paris 1930), and kept up correspondence with her husband even after his muse’s death. In 1881, she published “Le Corrège, sa vie et son oeuvre” (“Correggio, His Life and Work”) (Fischbacher, Paris 1881), a treatise on practical aesthetics, thanks to which she was awarded honorary citizenship of the city, in whose civic collections one can also find a self-portrait of her.
Margherita died in Livorno on 20th September 1887; her body received public honours and was displayed in a room in Florence Station, where Eduard Schuré and Angelo De Gubernatis recited a eulogy. She is buried in the Protestant cemetery at Porta Romana.
