“I decided to determine my dwelling in advance and… to announce my last intention”: The last will of Carlo Giuseppe Trezzini, the Italian architect of St. Petersburg (1768)
Authors:   Lomonosov Moscow State University, Kozlova Natalia V. 
Published: December 2024

Any new document relating to a famous person who has left a mark in the Russian history of the 18th century arouses special interest and a desire to add this contribution to the repository of information about him. Materials showing the inner world and personal concerns, and the relationships that existed within the family circle are of special interest because of their rarity, and finding such materials is a great success. Among the collection of notebooks of private legal acts of the Yustits-Kontora [Justice Office] (Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts), I have found the testament of the architect Carlo Giuseppe Trezzini (1697–1768), a representative of the famous clan of Swiss-Italian architects who actively participated in the consturuction of the new capital of Russia, St. Petersburg, during the first decades of its existence. He married Maria Lucia Tomasina, the daughter of Dominico Giovanni Trezzini, the famous chief architect of St. Petersburg, in 1719 in Astano (canton of Tessin in Italian Switzerland). Soon, the new family moved to St. Petersburg, where Trezzini worked for over 45 years, building and reconstuucting the palaces of the nobility, public buildings and churches. The last will of Carlo Giuseppe (in Russia he was called Osip Petrovich) Trezzini was recorded in German the day before his death on May 19, 1768, and contains orders of a religious, financial and property nature. It adresses the issues of burial, providing his three young illegitimate children, and their mother, Elena Sonn, the daughter of a Revel merchant, the means of livelihood, and raising the children in the Roman Catholic faith. The testament contains previously unknown details of the return of his lawful wife to Italy in 1744, as well as the evidence of love and care linking Trezzini with the woman who shared with him the last years of his life. Having no legitimate children with Maria Lucia Thomasina, Trezzini still recognized his legal wife as his direct heir and prescribed her the right to use the income from the villages located in Italy for life. They were bought with the funds allocated to his wife when she left St. Petersburg. After the death of Maria Lucia, all the property in Italy and St. Petersburg, according to the will of the architect, was to go to Elena Sonn and their common children. A month after the death of Carlo Giuseppe Trezzini, Elena Sonn, who became by that time the wife of Lieutenant
Ivan Feer, submitted his will to the Yustits-Kontora. There it was translated into Russian, and eight witnesses confirmed
the authenticity of the will by interrogations. Nevertheless, the architect’s widow tried to protest the will of her late husband through her attorneys, as she wanted to have full property rights over the possessions she had in Italy (in order to bequeath them to her nephews) and also over her husband’s property in Petersburg. The circumstances of this court case, which was investigated in the Yustits-Kontora and in the Senate for three years, are also discussed in the article. The text of Osip/Carlo Giuseppe Trezzini’s last will is published as an appendix.