Tasti di scelta rapida del sito: Menu principale | Corpo della pagina

Caroline Bonaparte

François Gérard, Portrait of Caroline Bonaparte. Ajaccio, Musée Fesch.
François Gérard, Portrait of Caroline Bonaparte. Ajaccio, Musée Fesch.

Caroline Bonaparte (Ajaccio, 25 March 1782–Florence, 18 May 1839) was the youngest of Napoleon’s sisters. Thanks to her strong character, in 1800 she obtained her brother’s permission to marry Joachim Murat, Napoleon’s aide–de–camp, despite that the future Emperor had nurtured different marriage plans for his sister.
In 1808 the couple was assigned the Kingdom of Naples, where Caroline promoted, among other things, a major excavation campaign in Pompeii.
At the fall of Napoleon, by then unpopular in the family due to an accumulation of tensions and disagreements, she was nevertheless considered a Bonaparte by the new rulers and was therefore constrained to move to Austria, where she took the name “Countess of Lipona”, an anagram for the Italian name for Naples, “Napoli”.
She only obtained permission to return to Italy in 1824, confined however to the city of Trieste, and had to wait until 1831 to be able to go to Florence, where she then lived until her death.
At her sister Pauline’s death, Caroline had inherited the Villa di Viareggio, in the province of Lucca, and undertook expansion and decorative work there.