Niece of the famous philosopher Gaetano Filangieri, daughter of General Carlo Filangieri and younger sister of Gaetano Filangieri, prince of Satriano, the countess Teresa Filangieri, born in Naples in 1826, became a famous writer, journalist and protagonist of the noble salons in a male-dominated nineteenth century and mostly closed to women.
But this does not mean it went down in history: it was hers social welfare activities and humanitarian works to ensure that in the Naples of those years it became a reference.
Married in 1847 to Duke Vincenzo Ravaschieri Fieschi, from which she took that surname with which we know her today, Teresa Filangieri Ravaschieri in the city everyone respected her for her good heart: she collected the poor on the street, hiring them at home as servants or keeping them economically.
After the Unification, Teresa’s philanthropy leaves her private sphere to establish itself on the institutional scene. In the 1860s Leopoldo Rodino was appointed patroness of the boarding school for blind girls founded by Lady Strachan. Later, the prefect Mordini instructed her to conduct, with other benefactors, an investigation on the royal boarding schools, and, during the cholera of 1873, the Committee organized for relief entrusted her with the organization of free popular kitchens.
Until, with this charitable spirit, in 1979, founded the first surgical hospital for children in Italy, built on the body of an ancient seventeenth-century building, in the heart of Chiaia. A hospital dedicated to the memory of his only daughter, his beloved Lina, who died on September 1, 1860 at just 12 years of age, after six years of illness: “She kept her head between her feet, gathering on itself like a ring … The pains returned with fever and my Lina, getting into bed, she said to me: Mamma mia, happiness is not for me … During the day she did not show her pain but at night I heard her cry. As her love for me grew, the pain of seeing her suffer grew in me. During the day and at night she did not want me, we were united by a love so strong that it seemed that the moon was taking life from the other … Lina, my Lina – I told her – you have been and will always be the life of my life “is written in the book Me, Teresa Ravaschieri by the scholar Valeria Jacobacci (Florentine publisher).
Eighteen years after the death of her daughter, Teresa found this building in Chiaia, a dilapidated shelter for the widows and orphans of Bourbon soldiers. But, for exposure to the sun, for that insatiable need to keep Lina’s memory alive, he decides that this was the ideal place to set up a hospital, to treat children from those infectious diseases that had taken away her creature. . In Naples, as elsewhere in those years, childhood was plagued by rickets and osteoarticular deformities, caused by tuberculosis, syphilis, poliomyelitis, malnutrition, and defects in hygiene standards. She, that hospital, feels it as an emergency. But to remember his Lina, he doesn’t want a gloomy place: he contacts the sculptor Francesco Jerace and entrusted him with the task of creating high reliefs and stuccoes to give relief to the infirm children.
On 25 June 1879 the hospital of Lina Ravaschieri sees the light and the “Ravaschieri di via Croce Rossa” as it is called by the Neapolitans, becomes a viaticum for a series of many other charitable initiatives.
Beside the charitable activity, Teresa devoted herself to writing: in 1879 her monumental was published History of Neapolitan charityon in four volumes, while in 1892 a collection of letters and memoirs dedicated to her friend was released Paolina Craven Laferonnays (wife of the British diplomat August Craven) and his family.
In 1903 in Come my hospital was born, tells the story and the network of relationships through which he became a leading figure in Neapolitan philanthropy and society.
In that same year, in 1903, he died in Posillipo on 10 September.
A figure, hers, of reference and Naples now dedicates a street to her, right there, in what was once via Croce Rossa.
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