Much has already been written about the painter Giovanni March, especially his life and artistic career, but little has been said about his family origins, apart from a few scant details about his father and mother and a vague “of Livorno origin”. So we think it worth clarifying once and for all both his paternal origins and a curious fact about one of his great-grandmothers.

As is well known, Giovanni March was born in Tunis on 2 February 1894 and died in Livorno on 30 October 1974. His parents, the sailor Enrico March (Livorno 1866 – Alexandria, Egypt, 1906) and the coral worker Iginia Carlesi (born in Livorno in 1875), had married in Tunis on 25 April 1893, as shown by the marriage record sent to Livorno through the Italian consulate in Tunis the following year.

Enrico March was in turn the son of the clerk Silvio March and Leonilda Emma Martini, both from Livorno.

This is where the story becomes more international and more interesting. Silvio March was the son of the ship broker Enrico Francesco March, the Italianised name of François Henri March, born in Nice on 19 May 1816. He moved to Livorno shortly after 1841 and there, on 28 May 1845, in the parish of SS. Pietro e Paolo, he married Adelaide Temelacchi of Livorno, one of the fourteen children of the merchant Giorgio Temelacchi and Emilia Turio.

So Henri François March came from Nice, and curiously Giovanni March also lived in Nice for a time, perhaps without knowing that his family came from that very city. Henri François’s father, Pierre March, was a prison guard, born in Villefranche-sur-Mer in 1787; he died in Nice on 20 March 1841.

Back to the Temelacchi: the merchant Giorgio (died in Livorno on 16 July 1849) was the son of the broker Giovanni Temelacchi and Anna Nocetti. This Giovanni came from Patmos, in Greece, where he was born around 1750, the son of Demetrio Temelacchi; he was the first of the family to come to Livorno, probably around 1780, and died there on 20 December 1823.

Here, once again, is a “typical Livorno family”: cosmopolitan and international, bringing together different languages, cultures and religions in an extraordinary city like Livorno.