Antoinette de Saint Leger

Antoinette de Saint Léger (born June 20, 1856 in Saint Petersburg , Russian Empire ; † January 24, 1948 in Intragna , Ticino ) was the owner of the Isole di Brissago from 1885 to 1927 and a well-known hostess for artists and writers at the turn of the century.

Life

Born Antonietta Bayer, she was born in the Russian Empire , possibly as the illegitimate child of Tsar Alexander II. Her mother was Wilhelmine Bayer, of German descent. In 1873 she married Friedrich Stolte († 1878) in Portici near Naples , then she was married to the much older Giulio Ewald Jaeger (1828-1883) from Messina (this marriage resulted from a son who died in 1950). Since 1881 she was married to Richard Fleming, a very wealthy Anglo-Irish officer who, after the death of an uncle, also held the title of Count of Doneraile and Baron of Saint Léger - allegedly bestowed by William the Conqueror . Thanks largely to the spouse's relevant botanical interests, the garden on the larger island was transformed into a botanical park.

From 1886 to 1914, Antoinette de Saint Léger's heyday was the hostess of her island residence. The painters Daniele Ranzoni , Filippo Franzoni and Giovanni Segantini were guests. The composer Ruggero Leoncavallo also came to Brissago, later (after 1918) James Joyce , Rainer Maria Rilke and Harry Graf Kessler . Antoinette de Saint Léger's position was undermined not only by her advancing age, but also by her propensity for business and other adventures. It invested in the Trans-Caucasian railway, Romanian trams and similar risky projects and suffered significant losses in the process. Faced with his wife's commercial and erotic antics, her husband retired to Naples in 1897, where he worked at the British consulate and died in 1922.

In the 1920s, Antoinette de Saint Léger lived alone on her island estate. She made dolls of famous beauty, but now also got into an ever deeper financial crisis due to her tendency towards lawsuits and the associated high legal fees. The sale of Isole di Brissago to the wealthy Hamburg businessman and bon vivant Max Emden in 1927 only improved their financial situation for a short time. She then lived in the Casa Moscia , a former mill and pasta and pastry factory ( Bolongari-Pisani ) in the Moscia district of Ascona , which Emden had bought for her. In November 1940 she moved to the San Donato retirement home in Intragna , where she died completely impoverished in 1948. The whereabouts of her more than 60 volumes of diaries is unclear.

literature

• Eberhard Mros: The Brissago Islands and their surroundings in the capricious game of times. Self-published, Ascona 2011, ISBN 978-3-9523402-1-9
• Daniela Calastri-Winzenried: The Baronessa. Dadò, Locarno, ISBN 978-88-8281-328-4 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Antoinette de Saint Léger and the Isole di Brissago. In: Heimatschutz = Patrimoine , Vol. 45, 1950, pp. 6-8.
2. ↑ Baroness Antoinette de St. Lèger, owner of the Brissago Islands ( Memento of the original from December 20, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Article on TICINarte.ch