Carlo De Franceschi
The historian of Istria, and this family's own. Everything the archive holds about one man, in the order it happened.
He is the most-cited De Franceschi in Istria and the reason a great deal of what is written about the province is written the way it is. He is also David's own line — out of the same village, off the same hill. This archive spends a whole page arguing with his book. It had never, until 9 September 2026, read his wedding.
«Persevere, dear De Franceschi, and gather what memories you can»
The historian being commissioned, in print, at thirty-seven.
«L'Istria», 9 May 1846: «…chi sente carità della patria, ha il debito di prestarsi… Perseveri, caro De Franceschi, ed in qualunque incontro raccolga quanto può memorie; l'uomo può più di quello che lo si pensi.» — «persevere, dear De Franceschi, and at every opportunity gather what memories you can; a man can do more than he is thought able to.» (doc.)
He did. «L'Istria»'s index of contributors for 1847 lists «de Franceschi Carlo» among Combi, Covaz, Cumano, Luciani and the rest of Kandler's circle — and the subscriber list of 26 December 1846 puts two of the name at Pisino: «de Franceschi Carlo» and «de Franceschi Francesco».
Thirty-three years later he publishes «L'Istria: note storiche». The line between the two is this sentence.
Found 28 September 2026 on the Portal Stare hrvatske novine — and only under the spaced spelling «De Franceschi», which no earlier sweep had tried. © Portal Stare hrvatske novine, Nacionalna i sveučilišna knjižnica u Zagrebu, 2009.
Born at Gologorica, 16 October
In a village of the county of Pazin whose registers open in 1644, in a house whose year — 1711 — is cut into the stone by his great-great-grandfather Giambattista, son of the late Leonardo. The family farmed the bishop of Pedena's rent here until the diocese was suppressed.
His parents are named in his own marriage entry forty-three years later: Giuseppe De Franceschi and Lambertina Pesle di Mattia. (doc)
Signing as a witness at Pazin
The first document in this archive that shows his hand rather than his print: Carlo De Franceschi signs as a witness at Pazin in 1842, aged thirty-two. He is already in the world of courts and paper that his marriage entry will name ten years later.
Attacked by name, in print, while he sat in Vienna
The Journal des Österreichischen Lloyd of 7 September 1848 devotes most of a page to calling him a libeller. The issue was found on 13 September 2026 by searching the Austrian press for the two-word spelling of the surname — a form this archive had never tried — and read the next day. Nine occurrences in four pages, and every one of them is Carlo.
The Lloyd's Trieste correspondents had been running articles arguing that Istria was «geschichtlich, geographisch und statistisch ein Land slavischen Elements» — historically, geographically and statistically a land of Slavic character. Carlo answered them with a Flugbogen, a broadsheet, «der eine grobe Schmähschrift gegen die Verfasser … enthält, und begreiflicher Weise in sehr vielen Exemplaren in Istrien verbreitet wurde» — a coarse libel against the authors, circulated in Istria in very many copies. This archive did not know that publication existed.
The reply is furious and it is personal. It opens by noting that the deputy has not yet uttered a sound in the chamber — «es wäre denn etwa durch Zischen oder Pfeifen bei der Seelinger'schen Motion», unless by hissing or whistling at the motion to thank Marshal Radetzky and the army. It accuses him of insulting the authorities and the foreign officials, the Kreisamt at Pisino above all; of impugning the election of Dr Jenny, Istria's deputy at Frankfurt; and of attacking Gyulai's projected Slavic-Istrian volunteer battalion.
And it quotes him in his own language. The OCR is badly corrupted, but under it the Italian is recoverable: «voi non Istriano, chi diede mandato d'immischiarvi [nelle] cose nostre, che per mille vi riguardano? Che vi cale, se non intendiamo di voler far parte della Germania, ed avere quindi l'alto onore di divenire connazionali di voi, Signore e consorti?» — you, not an Istrian, who gave you a mandate to meddle in our affairs, which concern you in a thousand ways? What is it to you, if we do not intend to become part of Germany, and to have thereby the high honour of becoming your compatriots, sir, and your associates?
He also, the correspondent reports with delight and repeats three times, called his opponent's bootblack as a witness against him — «den Stiefelputzer seines Gegners als Zeugen wider ihn». The opponent is named: Herr von Heufler. «Was hat der Stiefelputzer mit der Streitfrage zu thun, ob Istrien zu Italien oder zu den slavischen Ländern gehöre?»
Two things in it are new facts about his life, not new opinions about him.
First, his job. He is «k. k. Beamter, nämlich Rathsprotokollist des Landrechts zu Rovigno» — Imperial-Royal official, council protocolist of the district court at Rovigno. This site has had him as an Auscultans at Pazin in 1842 and expelled from the magistrature in 1854, with nothing in between. Here is the post he actually held in 1848. The correspondent cannot resist the obvious jibe: that for all his hatred of German Austria and his «bekannten Fanatismus für den republikanischen S. Marcus-Löwen», he never once failed «am 1. jeden Monats die Silberzwanziger mit dem österreichischen Doppeladler ganz gemüthlich einzustreichen» — to pocket, quite comfortably, on the first of every month, the silver twenty-kreuzer pieces with the Austrian double eagle on them.
Second, and this is a conflict this archive cannot settle: the Lloyd says he sat for ROVIGNO. Three times — «Der Deputirte von Rovigno zum Wiener Reichstag», then his court post at Rovigno, then a direct apostrophe: «Rovigno! das ist dein Deputierter am Reichstage zu Wien.» This site says Pisino, following the Italian scholarship. A hostile newspaper is not a better source than a historian — but it is a contemporary one, printed while he was sitting, in the city it names, and it is consistent with itself three times over. Both readings are now on the page and neither is preferred.
On the protest against joining the German Confederation — which this site already records him winning, with Facchinetti, Madonizza, Vidulich and Vlach — the Lloyd adds a detail that is almost comic. Asked in its columns who had authorised the three of them to protest, Carlo replied that they had done so as private persons and not as deputies, and that the word «Deputati» had got into the title by oversight.
Married at his own bedside, 1 March
31 · Addì 1 Marzo 1852 · Rovigno«**Il Signor Carlo De Franceschi q.m Giuseppe e della Sig.ra Lambertina Pesle di Mattia, da Gologorizza di Pisino, Assessore presso quest'I. R. Corte di Giustizia**, celibe, d'anni 40, contrasse matrimonio per verba de praesenti colla Sig.ra Maria Michelcich di Luca e di Maria, celibe, d'anni 26; **dispensati dalle trine pubblicazioni dall'Imp. Reg. Capitanato Distrettuale, urgente necessitate, colla nota del primo Marzo c. № 898 … al letto dello Sposo, per essere gravemente ammalato … alla presenza delli Signori Zaccaria Maver, Procuratore di Stato sostituto, e D.r Barzan, Medico**, testimonj.»
He was married lying down. The priest came to the house and performed it at the bridegroom's bed, because he was gravely ill. The three readings of the banns were dispensed by the Imperial-Royal District Captaincy that same day, on urgent necessity, by a note numbered 898 — the Austrian state turned around in hours because a man was thought to be dying.
The witnesses are not family. They are the deputy State Prosecutor and the physician: the law and the medicine, which is exactly who is in the room when a marriage has to be got through in time.
The entry also gives his office — Assessore at the Imperial-Royal Court of Justice at Rovinj — and both his parents' names.
He did not die. He lived another forty-one years. The register calls him d'anni 40; he was forty-two. (doc; the age is the register's, and it is wrong)
A son, and a small coffin
On the same Rovinj film: a burial of «Julius, son of Carlo», born 1853, dead 13 February 1854 at a few months old — conceived within a year of a wedding held at a sickbed, and buried before his first birthday. (doc for both records; that they are one family is inf, and rests on the name, the place and the dates)
«L'Istria», and what it does with the past
His history of the province, still the starting point for anyone working on Istria and still, in places, the problem. This archive reads it as a source and as an argument at the same time — it takes his charters and his household lists gratefully, and it says plainly where his politics are doing the work instead of his documents.
He is also, usefully, a man who names his own kind: it is Carlo who records Franceschi among the nobles of Pola «venuti da Capodistria» before the plague of 1631, which is one of the two candidate parents for the southern Istrian clusters this archive has spent today reading.
And in the same year, a Defranceschi wins the Istrian rural communes — but which one?
Two Croatian papers report the 1879 election in Istria, and neither is pleased.
«Galeb» (Bakar), 15 July 1879: «U našoj posestrimi Istri izabran je dr. D. Vitezić, dočim je drugi narodni kandidat dr. Klodić u seoskih obćina podlegao Talijanu Defranceskiju» — «in our sister Istria dr. D. Vitezić was elected, while the other national candidate dr. Klodić was defeated in the rural communes by the Italian Defranceski.»
«Naša sloga», 16 August 1879 returns to the Poreč district at length and names the men who went over «dušom i tijelom za Defranceskia» — body and soul for Defranceschi — calling them odpadnici, renegades. (doc for both.)
⚠ This page does not claim the man. Carlo was seventy in 1879, he was the province's best-known Italian-party figure, and this year already stands on this page as the year of his «L'Istria» — which is proximity, and proximity is how families acquire ancestors they never had. The papers give a surname and no forename. (open.)
What it does establish either way is that the name was on the Italian side of the Istrian national question in 1879, against the Croatian movement, and that two Croatian editors thought it worth the ink — which is the political weather this family's Istrian pages are written in.
Found on the Portal Stare hrvatske novine. © Portal Stare hrvatske novine, Nacionalna i sveučilišna knjižnica u Zagrebu, 2009.
The sentence that has to be quoted in full
«l'Istria non fu mai occupata da alcun popolo slavo»
Istria was never occupied by any Slav people. Stjepan Antoljak cites Carlo twenty-one times in Hrvati u prošlosti — and corrects him, including for misreading a charter and for confusing the Rječina with the Raša.
This archive quotes the sentence rather than paraphrasing it, and prints the correction beside it. A family archive that only quoted its ancestor approvingly would not be worth reading.
Died, and remembered on the hill
He is commemorated at Gologorica, under a shield — photographed for this archive in the field. And he is the only man on his concordance page whose likeness is known: a portrait in old age, which is why that page carries a warning about faces as much as an illustration.
The caution is not theoretical. On the day this page was written, another portrait on this site had to be taken off the direct line because it was the wrong Josip.
Rovinj marriages, DGS 005497870 image 211, entry 31, read 9 September 2026 · Gologorica and Gračišće registers, DAPA Pazin · Carlo De Franceschi, «L'Istria. Note storiche», Poreč 1879 · Stjepan Antoljak, «Hrvati u prošlosti». · «Journal des Österreichischen Lloyd», Triest, 7 September 1848, pages 1, 3 and 4 — ANNO, aid=oll, read 14 September 2026 from the issue's own Volltext.