page_title: Stamira
section_title: Later depictions
hierarchical_section_title: Stamira / Later depictions
caption_attribution_description: English: Italy, Ancona, Stamira statue - Middle-ages heroin (legend)
context_page_description: Statue of Stamira in Piazza Stamira in Ancona
  Stamira was, according to a long-standing tradition, a heroic self-sacrificing woman who saved the city of Ancona during the 1173 siege by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Her memory was later taken up prominently by Italian nationalism.
context_section_description: The events of the 1173 siege – including Stamira's heroic act - were narrated some years later, in 1204, by Boncompagno da Signa, in the ‘’Liber de Obsidione Anconae’’. Of this, three copies remain: one is kept in the Vatican, the second in the National Library of Paris and the third remained unpublished until 1723, when it was bought by Father Auriberti of Brescia, from which the text was translated and published by the historian Ludovico Antonio Muratori in 1725. In the Nineteenth Century this copy was again sold and transferred to Cleveland, Ohio.
  Muratori, after long research on the history of Italy – especially on the Medieval Period - published the "Annals of Italy", a major work recounting Italian history up to 1749, and giving considerable attention to the Heroine of Ancona. Muratori called her “Stamura”, and this version of her name was long current.
  In 1848 the publisher Pier Carlo Soldi of Florence brought out  the novel “The Siege of Ancona in The Year 1174” by the Italian Nationalist writer Giuseppe Cannonieri of Modena, written while Cannonieri was living in exile at Blois, France. In this account the story of Stamira/Stamura is made into a full-fledged historical novel in the manner of Alexandre Dumas.
  “Stamura" is given as her family name. The heroine's first name is given as Maria, and she has a daughter named Virginia. She is the widow of Pietro Stamura, a Milanese citizen, who for being opposed to the troops of Barbarossa, was brutally tortured and killed together with other Lombard patriots. (The manner of his death is described at great and horrifying detail). At the time of her heroic self-sacrifice, Maria Stamura is engaged to Guglielmo Gosia, son of Martino, Mayor of Ancona, and is a friend of the priest Don Giovanni da Chiò, another hero of the siege of 1173.
  All of the above details are entirely fictional, derived from 19th Century invention. Of the actual historical woman, hardly anything is known beyond the bare fact of her having been a widow. Still, the fictional account had a considerable popularity during the struggle for Italian Unification. Since that time, she is often characterized  as “An Italian Patriot” though this designation is an anachronism when applied to a person who lived at a time when Italy was divided into numerous, often mutually-hostile principalities and city states, and a common Italian national identity did not exist.
  In 1877 Francesco Podesti, himself a native of Ancona, made for the Earl Ragnini  a painting of Stamira. Another Podesti painting depicted The Oath of The Anconetani, also an incident of the same 1173 siege. The Stamira painting was eventually donated to the city of Bertinoro, in appreciation of the intervention of Aldruda Frangipane, Countess of Bertinoro, which ultimately helped  lift the siege. The canvas is placed at present at the office of Mayor of Bertinoro.
caption: The Statue of Stamira erected at the Piazza Stamira, Ancona
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