Barolo, Giulia Viturnia Francesca, Marchesa di

BAROLO, GIULIA VITURNIA FRANCESCA, marchesa di. - Born in the Vendée to the family of the minister Colbert, on her estate of Maulevrier, on 27 June 1785, d. at Turin on 19 Jan. 1864. She was an exile in Germany and in Holland with her father and family during the Revolution. Having returned to France under Napoleon and being called by him to be part of his court, she there met the Marquis Carlo Tancredi Falletti di Barolo, whom she married in 1807; at the Restoration she settled with him at Turin, in the ancestral palace of the B. (1814).

Formed in spirit by the servant of God Pius Brunone Lanteri (v.) and by St. Joseph Cafasso, with heroic activity and lavishing her wealth, she carried out a grand plan of spiritual and corporal charity. Following the example of what the Pastoret had done in Paris, whose asylum rooms she had visited, she was led to establish in 1829, in her own palace at Turin, an asylum for boys and girls, which she entrusted to the care first of secular teachers, then of the Josephine sisters, later replaced by the sisters of St. Anne of Providence, founded by herself in 1834. A second asylum was then established in 1835. Meanwhile the marchioness had founded another series of works of a moral and social character: the "House of Refuge" (1825), where fallen girls were taken in with the aim of remaking their education and starting them in the practice of a trade that would allow them to earn an honest living; the convent of the Magdalens, the college of the Magdalenines, the Oblates of St. Mary Magdalene (1825-39); the Giulietta college, the St. Joseph workshop, the Working Family Work, the hospice for sick and rickety children (1831-35); a complex of works aggregated at her death into the vast surviving Opera pia B.

It was also her merit to found a house of the Religious of the Sacred Heart and to create the parish of St. Julia in Turin. She was, as is well known, the maternal protector of Silvio Pellico; and in her palace she created a notable center of austere intellectuality, frequented also by Cavour and by the most influential persons. She was also an uncommon writer, especially in the unpublished Journal d'une femme, in her letters and memoirs published in part by Pellico and by Lanza (an extract of all these writings is: La marchesa di B., "Dalle memorie di una giovane signora", Alba 1942).