Italian noblewoman who played a prominent part in Italy’s struggle for independence. She is also notable as a writer and journalist. She married at 16, at the Church of St. Fedele in Milan on 24 September 1824. She was considered the richest heiress in Italy, with a dowry of 400,000 francs. Her libertine husband, Prince Emilio Barbiano di Belgiojoso, caused a separation soon after. They did not divorce and remained on cordial terms throughout their lives. In 1838, she had a daughter, Mary. The natural father was certainly not her estranged husband; it has been speculated that he may have been her friend Francois Mignet or her personal secretary Bolognini.
In the 1848 Italian revolutions, she organized and financed a troop of soldiers and fought in the Milanese uprising against the Austrians for Italy’s independence. After the insurrection failed, she returned to Paris and published articles in the influential magazine Revue des Deux Mondes describing the struggle in Italy.
In 1849 she returned to Italy to support the Roman Republic formed in the Papal States by Mazzini and others. She became a hospital director during the brief life of the republic until it was suppressed by French troops.
Cristina fled, accompanied by her daughter, first to Malta and then to Constantinople, from where she published an account of the republic and its fall in the French magazine Le National in 1850. She bought land in the remote Ciaq-Maq-Oglou area and then traveled to Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. Cristina published accounts of her experiences in the orient and found the condition of women there particularly disturbing. She published Of Women’s Condition and of their Future (1866) in which she argues that deprived of education, women come to accept the oppressive conditions in which they find themselves.
She lived in exile in Turkey for eight years before returning to Italy in 1856 and working with the statesman Camillo Benso Cavour for Italian unification which was achieved in 1861. In 1858 her estranged husband, Emilio—still legally her spouse—died. A few years later she was finally able to legitimize her daughter, Mary.
She died on 5 July 1871.
Link to Wikipedia biography