The Milan Insurance Company (known as Milano Assicurazioni) bought the Villamaggiore Estate in the province of Milan in 1908. The company then became part of the La Fondiaria Group (1984) and then the Unipol Group in 2012. The documentation on the estate was lost, but some registers with the inventory of the estate's assets have reached the Unipol Group Historical Archives. The oldest of these is of particular interest, which is entitled: '1817. Delivery of the corpus of goods from Villamaggiore' and is dated 28 September 1818. The register opens with these words: '1817. Index of the objects, declared and described in the following state of Delivery of the Corpus of Goods Constituting the population known as Villamaggiore owned by the illustrious Minor, the Marchioness Cristina Trivulzio'
- Il registo del 1817
Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso (1808 -1871), descendant of one of Milan's most important aristocratic families, is one of the protagonists of our Unification. In 1834, she financed Mazzini's failed expedition to Savoy. She returned to Milan in 1840, after a voluntary exile in Paris that lasted a decade.
- Cristina Trivulzio ritratta da Henry Lehman
She financed nurseries and schools for poor children at her residence in Locate (MI). She wrote essays on politics, philosophy and religion, and was a journalist and editor of patriotic newspapers ('La Gazzetta Italiana'). She supported and financed the insurrection of the Five Days of Milan, and after the return of the Austrians she was again forced into exile. She hid in Paris but reached Rome in 1849, where she was highly efficient in organising medical aid for wounded fighters in the defence of the Roman Republic.
- Text addressed to Roman women
After the fall of the Republic, she was again exiled and could only return to Locate in 1855, following an amnesty. During this period and after the Unification of Italy (1861), she devoted her time to writing on domestic and international political issues; she made an important and innovative contribution on the role of women in the article "Of the present condition of women and their future', which appeared in the periodical 'Nuova Antologia' in 1866. She was the first woman to whom the City of Milan dedicated a statue, inaugurated in September 2021.
