A rare commemorative composition by poet and performer Teresa Bandettini (1763-1837) on the death of the sister of one of her most important patrons, Maria Ottavia Odescalchi, Duchess of Zagarolo (1757-1829). Exceptionally well preserved, stitched in original publisher’s wrappers, this slight publication is very rare: we have found just one copy listed worldwide, in Switzerland.
Teresa Bandettini enjoyed considerable fame as an improvisational poet, a skill, she wrote, that she learned from her mother (Ricci, p.122). Born in Lucca and orphaned, following early renown as a dancer, ‘after her marriage she abandoned her dancing career for that of an improvisatrix, and held “Accademie d’improvvisazione” in which paying members of the audience proposed themes that she then elaborated extemporaneously in verse’ (Kern, ’Bandettini, Teresa’). Bandettini achieved great fame in Italy for her talents, under her own name and her Arcadian pseudonym Amarilli Etrusca, following admission to the Accademia dell’Arcadia in Rome in 1794. The relatively recent discovery of six lost sonatas dedicated to her indicate that the young Niccolò Paganini was a fan; that she was befriended, and painted by Angelica Kauffman (1794) as the muse of tragedy Melpomene, also speaks to her renown.
Bandettini’s elegiac poem here mourns the death of Maria Ottavia Odescalchi and describes a vision she had while sleeping, in which her friend descended from the heavens into Bandettini’s dreams, wearing a dress whiter than Apennine snow (p.5), to comfort her in her grief. Bandettini writes of Ottavia as an archetype of feminine purity, beauty, and spiritual devotion, a dutiful wife to her husband, and model courtier. Briefly an actress, Maria Ottavia became principal lady in waiting to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, after her marriage to Giuseppe Rospigliosi, Duke of Zagarolo, the Duke’s advisor.
Bandettini’s connection with her appears to have come about principally through her friendship with Ottavia’s brother, Baldassarre, who encouraged Bandettini’s membership to the Accademia dell’Arcadia at the end of the eighteenth century. A collection of poetry by other Arcadi, produced to mark the hanging of a (possibly Kauuffman’s) portrait of Bandettini in the Palazzo Altemps in 1794, is introduced by a laudatory essay by Odescalchi, praising the poet’s talents (see Adunanza tenuta degli Arcadi il di 2 Marzo 1794… Rome: i Lazzarini, 1794].
