Zatta, [137]
THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED
EDINBURGH
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Of Nicola Rossetti and Francesca Pietrocola, a respected married couple, I was born in Vasto, a city in Abruzzo Citeriore, in the year 1783. My brothers, all senior to me, were Andrea, Antonio, and Domenico. The first, admired for his pulpit-eloquence, became a Canon of the Collegiate Church of St Mary, the principal church in the city. The other two, endowed with much poetical talent, have left good evidence of this in their compositions. I had also three sisters—Angiola Maria, Maria Giuseppe, and Maria Michele. The first died unmarried; the other two married.
[2] I had various masters in the first rudiments of literature; but none was of so much benefit to me as the one who started me in “philosophy,” and who also nurtured in me the taste for poetry. He was a Regular Priest of that province, and he died in Naples at a somewhat early age. I shall always bless the name of Padre Vincenzo Gaetani.
[3] Now on my hands: one specimen forms our frontispiece. I have spoken of this matter in my Memoir of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, pp. 5 and 6, and I know that my father’s statement concerning it is not exaggerated. He executed also, towards 1804, a miniature of himself, of which, writing to his brother Domenico, he speaks in the following terms:—“A miniature portrait of myself, the work of my own hand when I exercised myself much in the fine art which imitates visible truths. I was at that time fresher-looking, and perhaps rather plumper, and slightly paler; before the sanguine-choleric temperament obtained the mastery in me with that vigour which it now displays. All who have seen it aver that it is truly myself.” This miniature used once to be in the possession of a Signora Vezzi of Parma: I know not where it may now be.—W.
[4] The Marquis who brought me to Naples was Tommaso, of the famous and very ancient house of D’Avalos, which was transplanted from Spain to Italy. [It was the same family as that into which the sixteenth-century poetess, Vittoria Colonna, beloved by Michelangelo, married.—W.]