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Biography

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Carlo Tancredi Falletti, Marquis of Barolo, was born in Turin in 1782 into an old Piedmontese noble family that held the marquisate of Barolo in the Langhe. He grew up during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic upheavals, when Piedmont was annexed to France. Like many aristocrats of his generation he spent time in Paris, where he met Juliette Colbert (known in Italy as Giulia Colbert), a French noblewoman of the family of Louis XIV's minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert. They married in 1806. After Napoleon's fall and the restoration of the House of Savoy they settled in Turin, making their principal home in the Palazzo Barolo.

In the Restoration era Falletti combined management of his estates with public life in the capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia. King Charles Felix appointed him mayor of Turin, an office he held from the mid-1820s into the early 1830s. As sindaco he promoted urban improvements such as lighting and paving and showed an unusual concern for poorer districts. He and Giulia had no children; contemporaries treated that childlessness as a motive for their intense shared charitable work.

The couple visited prisons, especially the women's prison in Turin, and established refuges, schools, and workshops to rehabilitate former prisoners and educate poor girls. Their most lasting foundation was the Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Anne (Suore di Sant'Anna), begun in the 1830s to care for and instruct abandoned or impoverished children. Falletti also took an interest in agriculture and in the wines of the family estates at Barolo; the cellars of the marquisate later became famous for the dry nebbiolo wine that bears that name, a development in which the household, and after his death his widow, played a part.

His health declined in the 1830s. In 1838 he went to Chiari, in the province of Brescia, then under Austrian rule, apparently in search of treatment, and died there in September of that year, in his mid-fifties. Giulia continued and expanded their works until her death in Turin in 1864; she became the subject of a Catholic cause and was later declared Venerable. Carlo Tancredi himself has not been beatified or canonized. He is remembered in Piedmont as a lay philanthropist and civic reformer, and as co-founder with his wife of institutions that long outlived him, including the Opera Barolo and the Sisters of Saint Anne.

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