Articolo disponibile anche in: Italian

When we say “Vespucci” we immediatly think to Amerigo, the famous florentine explorer who lived between the XV and the XVI century and he gave his name to the “New World” on which Cristoforo Colombo landed first.

The aspect that is less well known is about the events happened to his heirs over the centuries. The last male representative of the family, Amerigo Cesare, died in 1875 in Monteforalle, the castle of Greve in Chianti.

Italo Baldini, an expert of history from Greve in Chianti, reconstructed the history of “the last Vespucci”, book edited by Hollitzer, in which he tells the end of this big florentine family in particulary he has documented the events of the last generation: starting from the birth of Elena, in 1804, to the death of Ameriga in 1910.

A work lasted more than two years, began with the belief that not too much would be found to reconstruct the existence of the last Vespucci.

It was thanks to the author’s perseverance, as he ammitted, and also a bit of luck that he found so much documentation (including archive Colocci in Jesi in which is preserved the corrispondance among the last members of the family) to make the work interesting from an historical point of view but also full of curiosity and twists.

A real family saga that nothing has to envy to the best-known and celebrated stories, and where is interesting the character of Elena Vespucci, unknown in Italy but famous abroad, especially in the United States.

A woman with a complex personality, combative and anticonformistic, passionate traveler, with many lovers, whose adventurous history contrast with the one of her brother Amerigo Cesare, more anonymous character who died alone in Montefioralle, also for it he became a sad symbol of the end of the family.

The professor Italo Baldini points out proudly that there is so much of Greve in Chianti in this history: this territory was as a background for two of the most important navigator families: Vespucci and Verrazzano families.

“The Verrazzano and the Montefioralle Castles – explains Baldini – the two castles are one far from each other less than 3km only and they have the same height. And is curious the way in which the two families died away: the last representative of Verrazzano Family from Greve in Chianti he did not die in his homeland but in Prato in 1819, whereas the last male of Vespucci Family whose family was not from Greve in Chianti died in 1875 just in Castello di Montefioralle where he lived and where he had profits”.

So, the village of Greve in Chianti has seen the birth of the first representative of Verrazzano Family (Giovanni in 1485) and the death of the last representative of Vespucci family (Amerigo Cesare in 1875).

Matteo Morandini