Introduction by Mario Di Chiara, historical and genealogical research by Matteo Giunti.

For a general introduction, see the first “episode” of this series: From image to identity/1 – The Recouly-Roux and Vernière families in Livorno.

The recent discovery, in the Genoa area, of two nineteenth-century cartes de visite (cdv) from Livorno lets us put faces to two members of the Guibert family, who made part of their fortune in Livorno.

As for the author of these photographs, the Livorno photographer Giuseppe Agostino Marzocchini (1802-1865), it is worth remembering that in the popular imagination photographers followed in the tradition of painted portraiture, in which part of the artist’s prestige reflected on the sitters themselves. Choosing the city’s most prestigious photographer (Marzocchini is known as the first daguerreotypist in Tuscany) therefore underlined the Guibert family’s standing.

In this post, starting from these two cdv, which fortunately bear the sitters’ names and the year they were taken, we sketch the lives of the people portrayed and of their families, using primary sources from both Livorno and France.

The family of Fanny and Ernest Guibert

Ernesto (born 11 April 1846) and Fanny Guibert (born 2 March 1843) were two of the six children of Giuseppe Guibert and Onorina Emilia Arduin (born in Briançon), who married in Marseille on 21 November 1838 (the marriage was registered in Livorno as a foreign marriage) but whose family had lived in Livorno for two generations. Their other brothers and sisters were Giuseppina, Evelina (who died young), Enrico and Leopoldo (who died as a child).

It was these children’s grandfather, another Giuseppe Guibert, or rather Joseph Guibert, who came to Tuscany from La-Salle-les-Alpes, in the Hautes-Alpes department of France, right after marrying Marie Marguerite Bouchard, almost eleven years his junior, at Le-Monêtier-les-Bains, the bride’s home village, on 27 January 1813.

As early as 1815 Joseph Guibert, together with the Franco-Swiss Pietro Senn (the brother of one of Matteo Giunti’s ancestors, ed.), proposed opening a discount bank in Livorno, a project that the grand-ducal government carried out on its own the following year. The papers of the Livorno Chamber of Commerce show that Joseph Guibert and his brother Pietro Celestino had a trading firm which, after 1817, continued under Joseph’s name alone (Pierre Célestin seems to have emigrated to Brazil around 1819). Joseph’s son, Giuseppe junior, father of Ernest and Fanny, born in Livorno in 1814, later joined the business, at least until 1839, when the firm was wound up.

It is worth a brief digression on some of the Guiberts’ close relatives. Giuseppe Guibert junior, for example, was a first cousin of the merchant Camillo Agostino Saller (or Salle), husband of Amalia Caire, daughter of Pietro Caire and Clementina Pons, both well-known merchant families in Livorno. Another first cousin was Antonio Caire (also a cousin of Amalia Caire), husband of Giuditta (Mansueta) Torrini, niece of the painter Giuseppe Antonio Sforzi and cousin both of the engineer Angiolo Sforzi and of Aristide and Temistocle Sforzi, two martyrs of the Wars of Independence. Through Amalia Caire, links can be traced to many Livorno families, including the Pellegrini-Vianesi, the family of the music teacher Giuseppe Vianesi and of the conductor Augusto Vianesi; or that of the notary Pietro Dugi; or again the Malanima, Quilici, Tosi and Faiani, Boelhouwer families, and others.

Returning to the grandfather, Joseph Guibert, his family is listed in the 1841 Livorno census in the Cathedral parish: he, his wife and their youngest son, Federigo (born 1817), together with three servants. The other two children were already married and appear in their own households: Giuseppe junior in the parish of S. Benedetto, with his wife Emilia, a cook and a maid; and his sister Margherita Fanny (called Francesca) in the parish of SS. Pietro e Paolo, with her husband, the Lyon merchant Niccola Gregorio Caillon, their children and their servants (a cook, two wet nurses and two maids).

Joseph Guibert and his wife Marguerite Bouchard were ennobled in Fiesole shortly afterwards, in 1846. They took a coat of arms and claimed descent from the general and military theorist Jacques Antoine Hyppolite, comte de Guibert (1743-1790). In our opinion this descent is false, even though the Deputazione per la Nobiltà approved it, as shown by the file kept at the State Archives of Florence, which we consulted and partly reproduce below:

Joseph’s father was indeed called Antoine, but he was born in La Salle in 1746, died there in 1813 and was married to Agathe Salle (not De La Salle). He was neither a count nor a soldier, and he was the son of Benoit Guibert (1715-1760), not of Carlo as the false genealogy shown above right states.

Joseph died in Livorno on 29 June 1857 and was buried in the Misericordia cemetery, as were his wife, who died in 1877, and his daughter Margherita Fanny, married name Caillon, who died in 1899. These are their graves as they were a few years ago:

According to research by Stefano Ceccarini, there is also a Palazzo Guibert in Livorno, in Via Maggi, probably the building that now houses the teacher-training school. Volpi’s guidebook describes it as “…with a balcony in pietra serena stone and a rusticated doorway…” (the only building with these features in the first stretch of the street); see the image below (P. Volpi, Guida del forestiere per la città e contorni di Livorno, Livorno 1846, p. 141).

Back to Fanny and Ernesto’s generation: their elder sister, Giuseppina, married the engineer Captain Timoteo Bettolo (brother of Admiral Giovanni Bettolo), who was also mayor of Vecchiano. They had at least one son, Emilio, who married Marchesa Emilia Remedi, daughter of the well-known archaeologist and numismatist Marchese Angelo Remedi and of Fanny Guibert, which made them first cousins. The couple came to a tragic end: on 6 May 1916, in a fit of jealousy, Emilio shot his wife and then killed himself, leaving five children orphaned, as a short item in the Resto del Carlino reported the next day:

Their other brother, Enrico Guibert, born in 1844, married Albertina, daughter of the notary Sirio Fazzi (1819-1893), and had three children: Ernesto, who married Anna Maria Sperandia Piergili in Rome in 1917; Evelina, who married one Federigo Lippi, also in Rome, in 1895; and Enrichetta, who married in Livorno in 1906 the army officer Emilio Gamerra (1878-1946) (image below left), son of General Giovanni Gamerra and of another daughter of the notary Fazzi (Sofia). Enrichetta had a daughter, Albertina (1908-1968), mother of the future politician and trade unionist Gianluca Cerrina Feroni (1939-2014) (image below centre), and a son, Gian Paolo Gamerra (1907-1943) (image below right), an artillery officer in the Second World War and recipient of the Gold Medal of Military Valour.

The elder Ernesto (born 1846) died unmarried, aged only 25, in the family palazzo; his death record tells us he held a degree in mathematics. As already mentioned, the last two siblings, Leopoldo (Polidoro Leopoldo Federigo) and Evelina, died young, he in 1857 aged only 5 and she in 1862 aged 20. There may therefore be other living descendants bearing the surnames of the female lines, but for now we know nothing more.

[This article was updated after it was first published, following further discoveries about the descendants, and a further article on the Guiberts has been published HERE].