Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel: morire per la rivoluzione

Abstract

Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel, poetess, scholar of jurisprudence, natural and mathematical sciences, at first, was an enthusiastic supporter of Ferdinand IV of Burbon’s enlightened politics reforms. After the French Revolution and the radical change of Neapolitan government policy, much more illiberal and repressive, she was an active protagonist of 1799’ Revolution and founded the “Neapolitan Republic”. Editor of «Monitore napoletano», she was a free, courageous, journalist, committed in changing of “Neapolitan plebs” into “Civil people”. At fall of Republic, she showed herself fearless in meeting the death on the scaffold. Up to the Eighties of XX^th century, her final sacrifice has been represented by Virile woman’ image, as a praise for meaning an extraordinary, and intellectually like a man, woman. Today writers represent Eleanor like a “Modern heroin”, far by nineteenth-century Virile woman’s characters. Intellectual virtues do not seem to be sexed any longer: they belong to men and to women at the same time.