Dying in defence of our homeland and living for her love : Naples in 1799 through the past of revolutionary women

The essay analyses an inside female view of the Neapolitan revolution and counter revolution of 1799 and it situates three women's ideas and lives within multiple historical contexts. Naples, during 1799, was marked by social and political clashes collapsed, and thus preparing the way for the revolution. The myth of the Naples revolution marked a great part of the nineteenth and twentieth century culture. Referring to the peculiar conditions that distinguished the city as well as the population, the paper aims to examine the way in which historical interpretations of this catastrophic struggle were recorded by three distinctive 'revolutionary' women who lived through the revolution: Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel and Luisa Sanfelice, revolution martyrs who gave up their lives for freedom, and a British revolutionary novelist, Helen Maria Williams who far from Naples, shared the vocation to transmit the love for liberty. [Publisher's text].