Giovanni de Ciotta

Who was Giovanni de Ciotta?

Giovanni de Ciotta was the first-born son of Lorenzo de Ciotta and Luisa de Adamich, daughter of the foremost Fiuman merchant and father of modernisation in Fiume Andrea Lodovico de Adamich. The family de Ciotta originated from Livorno where Giovanni served the Austrian army in quality of engineer. As an officer of the Austrian engineer corps, he fought in Italy in the 1848-49 campaigns and remained in the army until 1859. He arrived in Fiume in 1859 from Livorno, after having resigned from the Austrian army, reputedly for political reasons. In Fiume initially he lived as a landlord and commercial agent for his brother Lorenzo who runs a trading company in Livorno, but soon turned to engineering. Nevertheless, his personal life remains a mystery.

Giovanni de Ciotta will rapidly become the most influential political representative in the City, incarnating the policies of Ferenc Deák in Hungary. Initially, Ferenc Deák had few open supporters in Fiume, where Lajos Kossuth was preferred, given the agitation done by his local exponent Gaspare Matcovich but a faction led by Luigi Francovich gradually emerged and coalesced around Deák's program in the 1860s.