325 ctrucks carrying 325 barrels of wine parade through the streets of Turin, towards Palazzo Reale, destined for the Savoy king Carlo Alberto, to satisfy his curiosity and quench his and the court’s thirst every day of the year, excluding Lent. Signing this legendary Piedmontese red marketing operation – so famous among professionals that it was replicated in 2015, with 325 bottles of Barolo left for Strasbourg, home to many EU institutions – Juliette, born Colbert, became Marchesa Falletti of Barolo upon marriage. Very devout and proudly Vendée, open to social issues so much so as to join the ranks of saints, like Don Bosco, who animated a century of Turin life, she went through the nineteenth century fertilely embodying its contradictions.
Juliette Colbert Faletti, Marchioness of Barolo
In fact, the ways and times of the Ancien Régime shaped her destiny as a girl: distantly related to the Colbert responsible for Louis XIV’s finances, she was born in 1786 in the castle of Maulévrier, in the Vendée with which she never ceases to identify , engine and symbol of the fierce opposition to the French Revolution. Extremely rich and influential, the family was decimated by deaths and confiscations in 1789 and left France. However, it was enough for Napoleon Bonaparte to promulgate the amnesty for the nobles in 1802 for him to recover a large part of his assets and rank: Eighteen-year-old Juliette is among Giuseppina Beauharnais’s ladies-in-waitingthe first wife of the future emperor.
And at court, where the Piedmontese nobles of the Savoy state also gravitate – transformed by the Revolution into a province beyond the Alps of France – she meets her future husband, the imperial page Carlo Tancredi Falletti. He too is heir to one of the wealthiest families in Europe and is four years older than her. The wedding in 1807pollinators and witnesses the emperor and empress, unites two like-minded people. Partly in Paris at court, partly in Turin, taking care of the many interests also in the Langhe and Monferrato, Tancredi and Giulia, young and without children, move to Italy and Europe, dealing with art, sharing the passion for design and that for social issues, in particular regarding the containment of poverty, education and prisons. It is precisely through travel that they weave a network of contacts with those who are promoting cutting-edge initiatives in those areas, which are the basis of their vast social promotion activity.
The first superintendent of prisons
Already in 1814, when with Napoleon in exile and the return of the Savoys to Turin the Falletti couple moved permanently to the family palace in via delle Orfane, Juliette, now Giulia, encountered the poverty of the city. The Savoy capital cannot offer dignified living conditions to the many underprivileged people arriving from the countryside and the tightening of the laws against vagrants and petty criminals crowds the prisons. Even the female ones that Giulia visits on Sunday in Albis, after she heard the desperate cry of a prisoner reaching the street. She so she writes in Prison memoirs, one of his many diary works: «Their state of degradation caused me pain and shame. Those poor women and I were of the same species, daughters of the same Father, they too were a plant of Heaven, had had an age of innocence and were called to the same heavenly inheritance.”
This awareness pushes her to intervene in a continuous and structural way on their living conditions. She is helped by the influence that the prestige of the Falletti name has on the ruling house, as well as by the brilliant character and tenacious obstinacy that her contemporaries attribute to her. She completes her first project: transferring the inmates to healthier premises, teaching them to read and write, «to learn the catechism and to give them dignity» she still notes in her diaries. In 1821 with a ministerial dispatch he became superintendent of prisons, an unusual role for the time and even more exceptional in a markedly reactionary political context. She was inspired by the Newgate model of reform of the London prisons, carried out by Elisabeth Frey, who she had met on her travels. The inmates of three different dilapidated institutions are therefore transferred to the new building that is made available to them.
A nursery on the ground floor of the house
It is the first piece of an ambitious plan dedicated to the promotion – or in Giulia’s words, redemption – of women. In 1822 the Refuge opened in Borgo Dora, a home for repentant women, former prisoners eager to work to secure a new life. What follows is the Refuge, a replica of the mother initiative, for girls aged 14 and up, and the institution of the Penitent Sisters of the Magdalene order for women who do not want to leave the institute but dedicate themselves to religious life. Over the years, and on the same land, the Santa Filomena hospital for poor and disabled girls was built; convents for nuns and lay oblates who dedicate themselves to charitable projects; a vocational day school for girls aged 10 to 18. The projects are intertwined with those of her husband, who in 1821 became a member of the government council and then in 1825 1826 mayor of Turin, dealing with urban planning and also education – in particular for the poorest pupils, for whom he created free art schools, to open up a career for them as artisans. Giulia and Tancredi also bring social activity into the home, opening up the rooms on the ground floor of Palazzo Barolo to a model kindergarten, for the children of the workers that the nascent industry left without care. On the main floor, meanwhile, in an apartment modeled according to the Empire style, all gold, columns and red enamels, where Sappho’s herm of Canova and the art collection which brings together ancient artefacts and paintings from all eras, guests of the most influential literary salon in the city are welcomed.
Over the years, the Counts De Maistre, Federico Sclopis and the Cavour brothers paraded there, with the young Camillo somewhat infatuated with the Marchioness, papal nuncios and ambassadors. A lobbying center, where Giulia carries out her charitable initiatives by relying on noblemen and noblewomen, including Carlo Alberto’s wife, Maria Teresa. Cesare Balbo was also present at the evenings at the Falletti house, who in 1832 introduced Silvio Pellico, who had returned from Spielberg, to the couple. He remained in the Palace until his death, united with Giulia by a very deep friendship, a source of more than just a few gossip, from which almost love poems and the first biography were born. The Marchioness of Barolo nee Colbert, released posthumously. In 1838 Tancredi, weakened by the consequences of the cholera that hit Turin in 1835, died. In Chiari, in an inn where his worsening condition stops the couple on their way to Tyrol. That death, in those conditions, for Giulia, who inherits all her husband’s properties, is the sign that her dedication to the poor must become even more decisive, to pay off, she writes, “the privilege of her ancestors, pay off the debts they have contracted with the exploited.” New vocational schools for girls are born, the Opera Pia Barolo is set up in Borgo Dora. Although downsized, the institution remains active in 21st century Turin, presided over for three years by the President of the Court of Appeal and for three years by the Archbishop, in the sign of that alliance between throne (State) and altar from which Giulia never retreated .
The invention of Barolo
When the Marchioness of Barolo died in 1864, she had time to perfect one last ambitious project: restore income to the vast properties in the Langhe and Monferrato, “changing towards” a wine, Barolo, which was already known as a sweet and sparkling wine and then from 1838 with the contribution of the oenologist Louis (or perhaps Pierre) Odart gained fame as the King of wines to be appreciated aged. The winemaking enterprise is not the only trait that links the figure of Giulia, divided between social drive and conservative nature, to the contemporary world: in May 2015, thanks to her charitable “heroic virtues”, she was proclaimed Venerable, a title that represents the first step of hierarchical scale of sanctity. Three years later she will also become Tancredi.
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