Partner Margaret of Parma
Queer Places:
Fortino Delle Donne, Via Biagio di Montluc, 53100 Siena SI
Laudomia Forteguerri (June 3, 1515 – 1555) was an Italian poet.
Laudomia was born of Alessandro Forteguerri and Virginia Pecci and was baptized on June 3, 1515.[1] She married Giulio Colombini and had three children: Olimpia in 1535, Antonia in 1537 and Alessandro in 1539. The scholar Alessandro Piccolomini, who courted her for years, dedicated to her the dialogue La Raffaella in 1539, in which he represents Aspasio's loves with Margherita, an unhappily married woman. In 1540 he dedicated two scientific operettas to her, De la sphere del mondo and De le stelle fisse, while he dedicated to her son Alessandro, to whom he had been godfather, the treatise De la institutione di tutta la vita de l'huomo nato nobile, published in Venice in 1542 . Marcantonio Piccolomini, one of the founders of the «Accademia degli Intronati », also made her the protagonist of his dialogue Il Sodo Intronato, dated 1538, while Benedetto Varchi in a sonnet and Bernardo Tasso in Amadigi praised her great beauty. Then when Laudomia, widowed in 1542 , remarried in 1544 to a Petruccio Petrucci,[2] Alessandro Piccolomini argued that Forteguerri would have failed her oath of eternal love.
Forteguerri also wrote poems, in the form of the Petrarchian sonnet. Six were published, one dedicated to the poet Alda Torella Lunata and the other five to Princess Margaret of Parma, the natural daughter of Charles V, known in Siena in 1535. It was publicly praised in 1541 by Alessandro Piccolomini at the Accademia degli Infiammati. Recently it was finally accepted to take into consideration the notion, handed down by several of his contemporaries, that the one between Forteguerri and Margaret of Austria was a bond of love: " Their love was not a great secret, if in fact the scholar Alessandro Piccolomini talked about it in several of his printed works and the abbot Agnolo Firenzuola in his Dialogue on the beauty of women, and even in France the irreproachable Brantôme made it entry in his Recueil des dames, poésies et tombeaux.[4] "
An independent and determined woman, Forteguerri took an active part in the defense of Siena during the siege of the city conducted in 1555 by the Spaniards and the Florentines of Cosimo de' Medici, organizing a group of women in the construction of fortifications.[5] The episode, narrated for the first time by the French commander Blaise de Monluc, an ally of the Sienese, was then resumed, consolidating Forteguerri's reputation as a woman of great beauty as well as great courage.
The Fortino delle Donne Senesi (also called Fortino di Pescaia[1]) is a bastion on today's Via Biagio di Montluc near and west of Porta Camollia. The complex was built around 1530 and was planned by Baldassare Peruzzi. The small fortress (Fortino) with a wall thickness of 2.30 m plays an essential role in the siege of the city by the Fiorentines 1554–1555.[41] Forteguerri helped construct it and the bastion is the only one of the five buildings planned by Peruzzi not located directly on the city wall. [43]
There are those who thought that she died during the siege,[6] and therefore in 1555, but the circumstance, in addition to having no other evidence, seems to be denied by the dedication made to her in 1556 in a sonnet by the scholar Giuseppe Betussi,[ 7] which describes her still living in a Siena that had by now lost its independence.
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