Giustino Fortunato (1777-1862)

Giustino Fortunato, also known as Giustino Fortunato senior (20 August 1777 – 22 August 1862) was an Italian magistrate and politician. His nephew was the Italian historian and politician Giustino Fortunato (1848-1932).

Born in Rionero in Vulture, little town in Basilicata, to a middle-class family, he moved to Naples to study jurisprudence. Follower of the Jacobin ideas, he was a student of Carlo Lauberg and met other intellectuals such as Francesco Mario Pagano, Ettore Carafa, Emanuele De Deo and Ignazio Ciaia. He taught math at the Nunziatella military academy for a short time.

With the rise of the Parthenopean Republic in 1799, he was nominated judge of the peace. After the arrival of the anti-republican troops of the cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, Fortunato fought them in a desperate battle at the "Ponte della Maddalena". Defeated, he was imprisoned in the Sant'Elmo castle but, with the help of Vincenzo Parisi, he fled and hid in his house in Moliterno. After the Bourbon restoration, he exercised the lawyer profession.

Under the government of Joachim Murat, he covered judicial duties and, along with Vincenzo Cuoco and Pietro Napoli-Signorelli, had a great role in the rebirth of the Accademia Pontaniana (1808); Fortunato's house was a meeting place of intellectuals like Melchiorre Delfico, Vincenzo Monti, David Winspeare, Michele Tenore and Teodoro Monticelli. In 1814, Murat nominated him intendant of Chieti. After the Treaty of Casalanza, Fortunato remained in the rank of bureaucracy under Ferdinand I but was fired for having supported the Carbonari riots in 1820. He was reinstated by his nephew Ferdinand II, who gave him the mansion of minister without portfolio (1841) and finance minister (1847).

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