Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel

Eleonora Anna Naria Felice de Fonseca Pimentel ( Leonor da Fonseca Pimentel Chaves, * January 13, 1752 in Rome, † August 20, 1799 in Naples) was a Portuguese Italian-speaking poet during the time of the Bourbon Kingdom of Naples and the short-lived Neapolitan Republic of France's grace.

Life

Your coming from Portugal parents were of noble birth and moved to Naples in 1760. Privileged, wrote " Leonor " even as a child poems and read Greek and Latin.

In the seventies of the 18th century they moved in Neapolitan intellectual circles. Her writings were marked by illustrationistischem and masonischem thought and she corresponded with intellectuals of their time among others with Metastasio. The initially more liberal-minded Queen Maria Carolina, she devoted time even glorifying poems.

In 1798 she was briefly arrested for Jacobin intrigues, but was released during the construction of the Neapolitan Republic in 1799 and became one of its Hauptproponentinnen. So it was about the editor of the newspaper Il Napoletano monitors, the official newspaper of the Neapolitan Republic.

When it succeeded in the same year the royal couple fled to Sicily with the help of the British Admiral Horatio Nelson to return to Naples, issued a terrible judgment on the exponents of the Neapolitan Republic. Together with leading politicians of the Republic and virtually the entire Republican elite Naples she was imprisoned and sentenced to death. She mounted the scaffold with the quote from Virgil: Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit ( "One day there will be an enjoyable moment to remember ").