Biography
Pimentel was born in Rome of Portuguese nobility. She was a precocious child who wrote poetry and read Latin and Greek. As a child, she moved with her family to Naples as a result of political difficulties between the Papal States (of which Rome was the capital) and the Kingdom of Portugal.
In the 1770s she became an important part of literary circles of the day in Naples. Much of her literary output was given over to voluminous exchanges of letters with other literati. Most prominent of these is a long correspondence in the 1770s with Metastasio, the Italian court poet in Vienna and greatest librettist of the 18th century.
In the 1790s she became involved in the Jacobin movement in Naples that was working to overthrow the monarchy and establish a local version of the French Republic. She was one of the leaders of the revolution that overthrew the Bourbon monarchy and installed the republic in January 1799.
For the short life of that republic, she wrote most of the material for, and edited, the Monitore Napoletano, the newspaper of the Neapolitan Republic - named in emulation of Le Moniteur Universel in France. When the republic was overthrown and the Bourbon monarchy reinstalled later that year, she was one of those revolutionaries executed by the sham royal tribunals implemented by Horatio Nelson.
She tried to avert the death penalty by claiming to be pregnant. When she was discovered not to be, she asked at least to be beheaded, not hanged, but there was no mercy. The public hanging of a noblewoman was seen as something quite outrageous. Eleonora Pimentel had not committed any crimes during the revolution, only edited newspapers and worked as a journalist.
Reportedly, a main reason for the resorted monarchy insisting on her execution were pamphlets she wrote denouncing Queen Maria Carolina of lesbianism.
Read more about this topic: Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel
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