Paolo’s Early Life and Family
The 12th of February 1862 to Cesare Ruggeri, Captain (born in 1839, died in 1908) and to Countess Rina Laderchi (born in 1838, died in 1898) was born in Bergamo “Paolo,” first-born son (born in 1862, died in 1940).
Following tradition they gave him the name “Paolo” which was the name of his paternal grandfather; to the second son was given the name Carlo, that of his maternal grandfather. The family was completed with two females, Teresa and Giulia.
With Paolo and Cesare begins the counting of the various “Paolos” of the family, adding now to Paolo V.
Paolo of Cesare was therefore Paolo Primo (Paolo the First) and the founder of the Family Ruggeri-Laderchi, not only because he was the first, but also, he, the founder, had temper and vision.
The infancy of Paolo Primo was supported and guided by a type of mother, Rina, who from her father Carlo and her Uncle Camillo, had inherited intelligence and culture. His father, Cesare, Garibaldian official, first, and then of the Royal Army, passed a large part of his young years in the carrying out of the tasks entrusted to the army in the first years of the Unity of Italy. A young wife and with her child, Paolo Primo, in her arms, Rina followed her husband into the discomforts of the country against the briggantage in Calabria where the family sojourned in the first years of their marriage.
It was Rina Laderchi who gave her imprint to the family: intelligent, volitional, decisive, she knew to confront the difficult times in which she lived, not easy because her husband Cesare fell ill while yet young with arthritis and step by step it immobilized him.
She died at sixty; she had a weak heart, a slight trait of the Laderchi family, which she passed to her daughter Giulia, whose heart did not hold out during an influenza epidemic and died at 25, and to a much lesser degree to Paolo Primo who always had to deal with violent physical efforts.
In the last years of Rina Laderchi’s life, I her little grandson of a few months, was entrusted to her for more than a year, while Paolo Primo and his wife were in Crete on a Government mission. I don’t remember it, but I know I was to her “the last consolation of her life,” as she herself said, She was the most beautiful and slightly lame due to a fall at a young age. This induced her to walk as if she grazed the earth and so a defect was transmuted, by way of her will, into a mince.
Cesare lived longer; he died at 69 in Foggia in 1908 in the house of his son Carlo where he had gone for a visit. He lived regularly with his daughter Teresa wife of Doctor Bosi who, at Tredozio (on the Faenza – Firenze ) exercised the profession of conducted doctor. Immobilized and wheelchair-bound, he was left to constructing long trips in his mind, of which he knew the itineraries and schedules perfectly. He also read a lot, but if he desired a true rest, he daydreamed, so that the things seen in his happy times re-flowered and, freeing himself from his “old carcass” — as he called it — his imagination found itself in his trips, the joys of a former time.
And he died from traveling; after a lot of fantasizing he absolutely wanted to complete the journey from Tredozio to Foggia where his son Carlo was garrisoned, and there he died a few days after his arrival.
To Paolo Primo, who had rushed to his bedside and asked him, “Papà, how is it going?” he responded with a smile, “As you see… I’m going.”
He lies in repose with his wife Countess Rina Laderchi, in the cemetery of San Miniato at Piazzale Michelangelo – Florence.
Cesare Ruggeri
Cesare enrolled voluntarily at a very young age in Piedmont in 1859; he participated with the Garabaldine Troops in the campaigns of 1859 and of 1866; he passed therefore, at the Unity of Italy, into the Royal Army where he pursued a short career up to the grade of Colonel, truncated by arthritis contracted while in service.
The family that belonged to Cesare, was from Codogno, a tiny Lombard town near Lodi. The Ruggeris held a prominent position there; they were landowners whose properties were generally administered by the first-born while the other male children went into army careers or free employment.
Cesare was the second-born; the first, Biagio, talented engineer and architect, while occasionally serving as an Officer when he was called back, remained in Codogno and lived in a house on the Family property, which now belongs to the Vaghi and is situated on Via Dante n. 6, a few steps from the main Piazza and therefore in the center. Biagio (at home he was known as Uncle Biagio) was the uncle of Paolo Primo and had two children who died at a young age. He lived with some sisters and we never met him because he died when we were in Russia and still too young to remember him. Paolo Primo inherited from him the author’s two oil paintings: a Madonna with Child by Luini and another Madonna in the style of Michelangelo. The small Madonna by Luini has passed already for 150 years in the family from father to son; on the back side of the canvas are written the names of the Ruggeris who have owned it: Biagio from 1810 to 1845; Paolo from 1845 to 1862; Cesare from 1862 to 1908; Paolo Primo from 1908 to 1940; Cesare II from 1940. The Michelangelo-style Madonna, with child, St. Joseph, and St. John, when it was added to our house was missing St. Joseph, covered and hidden by a coating of dark paint; in having the canvas cleaned this leaped forward behind the Madonna in the upper left-hand corner of the canvas. And to tell the truth, St. Joseph, angular and bearded, contrasts with the sweetness of the Madonna and this perhaps explains why one of our ancestors thought well of making him disappear. There are those who say it could be the self-portrait of Buonarotti.
The Ruggeris were nobles descended from a French family of the name Rosier, transplanted in Italy and precisely in Liguria. Therefrom they italicized their surname to Rosieri, first, then to Ruggeri. The French family had a coat of arms with three red roses on a blue field. The roses became with time three stars. In the Ruggeri-Laderchi coat of arms, in the part that is of the Ruggeris, the stars still appear on a blue field with the addition of a plainly visible, foreshortened, red cross on an abyss of the head of a beheaded lion.
Now while in Italy there are many families with the surname Ruggeri, none of them are of our stock. Carlo Ruggeri, brother of Paolo Primo, General of the Division, and upright man and soldier, had only one daughter Tina who married Parisi, from whom come our Parisi cousins. Teresa, sister of Paolo Primo, married Bosi, doctor in medicine and had two children: Nina who married the engineer Calza and Vittorio, from whom come our Calza and Bosi cousins.
Rina Laderchi
Rina, mother of Paolo Primo, was a Laderchi of the Ferrara branch. Another branch was in Faenza and resettled in the city where they had a Palazzo.
The Laderchi family had its birthplace in Emilia and there unfolded the life of its members. They descend directly from the family of the Malpigli, very known in Bolognese, precisely from Erro da Malpiglio who was Consul of Bologna in 1173.
According to the “Blasone Bolognese” of Canedoli, the Malpigli coat of arms is of blue with a red band and therefore has analogy with that of the Laderchis which is of red with a green band broken and edged in silver.
Malpiglio, born in 1191, lived during the period of the battles between Bologna, Imola, Faenza, and Ferrara. A knight, brilliant in his wisdom and valor; his natal city compensated him by making him a castle-owner and feudal landowner of the Castle of Laderchio or of the Derchia in the Senio Valley.
There in fact at the confluence of the Sintria and the Senio, in the surrounding of Riolo and not far from the Castel Bolognese, is found a vast estate with a large farmhouse on which a plate of marble says: “Fondo Derchia” (“Derchia Ground.”) The farmhouse is found on the ruins of the ancient Castle of Laderchi of which nothing more exists, while not far away there are the ruins of the what was the Tower of Laderchio. On the paper at 25,000 of the Military Geographical Institute the locality is indicated with the inscription La Derchia.
At the end of the 1700s Ludovico 10/III Laderchi had the eponymous Palazzo built at Faenza.
Seeing as he already had a factory on Corso Ravegnate, to make it so the that windows of his Palazzo open onto the main Palazzo of Faenza, he bought the church that was between him and the Piazza, he rebuilt it on the other side of his property and in place of the church amplified his dwelling creating there the grandiose Gallery and other rooms.
The architect of the new Palazzo was Francesco Tadolini; the valuable stuccoes of the Gallery are by Antonio Trentanove and the festoons of flowers and fruit bound with multicolor ribbons are by Ugolini.
In 1600, Giovanni 2/II called the Imola possessed in Ferrara a Palazzo on the main street of Giovecca. That Palazzo was constructed in 1494, in the care of the Ghillini family, therefrom passing to Giovan Battista Laderchi, and afterwards to the Bonleis, and thence to the Rossis and to the Braghini Nagliatis.
In 1489 Giacomo 4/I Laderchi bought from the Fathers of St. Domenico a chapel in the Church of St. Andrea delle Vigne in Faenza (the church is also known by the name of St. Domenico). The altar of the chapel is in very beautiful colored marble, and has on the front part two pilasters on each of which is reproduced the Laderchi coat-of-arms.
The altar is named after the Visitation, but ordinarily it is called the altar of St. Joseph. It is the second on the left. In front of the chapel on the pavement on the church there was until recently a stone where was written “Sepulcrum Laderchiorum”. Under this there were the niches where all the Laderchis were interred with their respective wives until the end of the 1800s. When it was no longer permitted to bury in the churches, the Laderchis were interred at Prado where they had large estates.
The pavement of the church was redone around 1950; in place of the stone, which no one knows where it ended up, is now the number 19 in golden metal.
At Ferrara, in the Church of the Jesus on Corso Giovecca, there is the funerary monument of Giovan Battista 2/II Laderchi, where he is buried.
The Ruggeri-Laderchi Family 