10 Facts About Leopoldo Franchetti

Leopoldo Franchetti was a deputy in the Italian Chamber of Deputies and later became a Senator.

Leopoldo Franchetti was very active in promoting education and concrete solutions for economic, social and political problems in Italy both through his own political initiatives and through his support of his wife Alice Hallgarten.

The Leopoldo Franchetti family came to Livorno from Tunisia in the last decades of the eighteenth century.

Leopoldo Franchetti was influenced by the ideas of John Stuart Mill and became a liberal.

In 1876, Leopoldo Franchetti travelled to Sicily with Sidney Sonnino to conduct an unofficial inquiry into the state of Sicilian society.

Leopoldo Franchetti's half of the report, Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily, was an analysis of the Mafia in the nineteenth century that is still considered authoritative today.

Leopoldo Franchetti saw the Mafia as deeply rooted in Sicilian society and impossible to quench unless the very structure of the island's social institutions were to undergo a fundamental change.

Leopoldo Franchetti undertook the first land expropriations in 1893 with the vision that two million Italian peasants would settle down in Eritrea.

In 1880 Leopoldo Franchetti moved to Citta di Castello and in 1900 married Alice Hallgarten born in New York in 1874, with whom he moved into the recently completed Villa della Montesca.

Leopoldo Franchetti died of mysterious causes, perhaps suicide, after the dawn of the defeat in the Caporetto in World War I and left his estate to a charitable organization and his farm to the farmers who worked it.