Background
Giuditta Bellerio was born in 1804 in Milan, the daughter of a magistrate of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy.
Giuditta Bellerio was born in 1804 in Milan, the daughter of a magistrate of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy.
She was also the lover of Giuseppe Mazzini for a period and operated a salon in Turin for Italian expatriates. Following a revolution in 1820-1821, Giovanni Sidoli was forced to flee to Switzerland, and was later joined by Giuditta after she gave birth to a daughter. Giovanni died in 1828 of a lung ailment.
During another wave of revolutionary activity in 1830-1831 she joined Ciro Menotti in revolutionary plots against the Duchy of Modena.
She fled to Switzerland again as the Austrians put down the revolution. There she met Giuseppe Mazzini and became his lover.
Mazzini once told her "Smile at me always! lieutenant is the only smile that comes to me from life." Giuditta Sidoli would run the finances for Mazzini"s new Young Italy society. Giuditta gave birth to a son named Joseph Aristide while in Marseilles, almost certainly fathered by Mazzini.
Sidoli would continue to follow Mazzini and nurse him in his bad health as he moved to Geneva.
She did little else until 1852 when she operated a salon for Italian revolutionaries. By this time her love affair with Mazzini was effectively over, and they rarely saw each other again. Giuditta Sidoli died of pneumonia on 28 March 1871.