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Charlotte Napoléone Bonaparte

Charlotte Napoléone Bonaparte
Charlotte Napoléone Bonaparte

Charlotte Napoléone Bonaparte (Montefontaine, 31 October 1802–Sarzana, 2 March 1839) was the younger daughter of Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, and in 1826 married her cousin Napoléon Louis, the son of Louis and Hortense de Beauharnais.
She studied lithography and engraving throughout her childhood and youth, continuing to practice these arts for her entire life, and moved to the United States after her father, remaining there from 1821 to 1824. Widowed after only five years of marriage, she settled in Florence where she initiated a lively cultural salon frequented by intellectuals, artists and exiled nobility. Through this activity she met a young Polish count with whom she had a romantic relationship that resulted in a pregnancy. Traveling from Livorno to Genoa while pregnant, she stopped in Lucca due to serious haemorrhaging, but quickly resumed the trip, to then stop immediately in Sarzano due to the continuation of her pain. Here Charlotte stayed in the Locanda della Posta, today the Palazzo Neri, and was cared for by two local physicians and an obstetrician, but her cousin Felice Baciocchi, seeing that she was not improving, urgently sent for the illustrious Pisan gynaecologist Regnoli, who conducted a caesarean section. Charlotte died after the operation in the room that today opens onto the indoor garden of the house and her remains were transported to Florence where they were buried in the basilica of Santa Croce and where, the following year, Lorenzo Bartolini sculpted a funerary monument in her honour.

Charlotte repeatedly visited Versilia and the island of Elba between 1828 and 1830, as testified by some of her drawings.