Simonetta Postcard

Simonetta by brett66 and Sandro Botticelli. She was born Simonetta Cattaneo de Candia circa 1453 in a part of the Republic of Genoa that now exists within the Italian region of Liguria. A more precise location for her birthplace is unknown: possibly the city of Genoa, or perhaps either Portovenere (now Porto Venere) or Fezzano (villages in the modern-day municipality of Porto Venere). The Florentine poet Politian wrote that her home was "in that stern Ligurian district up above the seacoast, where angry Neptune beats against the rocks ... There, like Venus, she was born among the waves." By birth she was a noble lady of the House of Volta and the House of Candia. Her father was a Genoese nobleman named Gaspare Cattaneo della Volta (a much-older relative of a 16th-century Doge of Genoa named Leonardo Cattaneo della Volta) and her mother was Gaspare's wife, Cattocchia Spinola de Candia (another source names her parents slightly differently as Gaspare Cattaneo and Chateroccia di Marco Spinola. At age fifteen or sixteen she married Marco Vespucci, son of Piero, who was a distant cousin of the Florentine explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci. They met in April 1469; she was with her parents at the church of San Torpete when she met Marco; the doge Piero il Fregoso and much of the Genoese nobility were present. Marco had been sent to Genoa by his father, Piero, to study at the Banco di San Giorgio. Marco was accepted by Simonetta's father, and he was very much in love with her, so the marriage was logical. Her parents also knew the marriage would be advantageous because Marco's family was well connected in Florence, especially to the Medici family.