Marianna Gandolfi is a Roman National who was bearing insufferable poverty. At the age of seventeen she decided to leave her homeland for Italy and try her hand at what she called “suicide by marriage”. She was very young, but at that time the word “suicide” did not exist, so she thought that this would be a good way to try and make a name for herself. After crossing the Alps on foot and riding a horse she made her way to Venice. There she worked as a cook and as a dancer in the circuses. Eventually she decided that she wanted a career that would allow her to move around Europe and show off her unique talents.
At the age of twenty-one she managed to escape from a Prussian prison where her partner had died and she moved to Genoa. There she teamed up with Flavio Colonuccia who was thirty years her senior, they shared a room in a small apartment. They married in September of eighteen hundred and five and although it wasn’t legal under Roman standards it was done nonetheless. This would have been impossible with either marriage under Italian law or nationality law as it was assumed that only an Italian could give birth to a foreigner.
Marianna Gandolfi was a firm, intelligent, attractive woman with a European flare who looked much to her age. After suffering an illness which left her bedridden for the better part of two years she managed to reinvent herself. On her return to Venice she changed her name to Marianna Maria and presented herself as a model and actress. This time, her career took off and she was soon acting in over twenty films that paid tribute to both her beauty and her intelligence. She was awarded the Order of Florence during the year nineteen eighty-one by Pope Benedict XVI.