Letizia Ramolino

Who was Letizia Ramolino?

Nobile Maria Letizia Buonaparte née Ramolino was the mother of Napoleon I of France.

She was born in Ajaccio, Corsica, to Nobile Giovanni Geronimo Ramolino, Captain of Corse Regiments of Chivalry and Infantry in the Army of the Republic of Genoa, and wife Nobile Angela Maria Pietrasanta. The distant cousins of the Ramolinos were a low rank of nobility in the Republic of Genoa. Letizia was not formally educated. After the death of her father, her mother remarried to the Swiss-born noble naval officer Franz Fesch, a captain in the service of the Republic of Genoa stationed at Corsica, and gave birth to two children, among them her half-brother Joseph Fesch.

On 2/7 June 1764, when she was 13, she married attorney Carlo Buonaparte at Ajaccio. She bore 13 children, eight of whom survived infancy, and most of whom were created monarchs by Napoleon:

Napoleone Buonaparte

Maria Anna Buonaparte

Joseph Bonaparte King of Naples and Sicily, King of Spain and the Indies, and Comte de Survilliers, he married on 1 August 1794 Marie Julie Clary .