Jessie White Mario

Jessie White Mario (9 May 1832 in Hampshire, England – 5 March 1906 in Florence, Italy) was an English (and naturalized Italian) writer and philanthropist. She is sometimes referred to as "Hurricane Jessie" in the Italian press.

She was a nurse to General Garibaldi’s soldiers in four wars; she researched living conditions in subterranean Naples and working conditions in Sicily’s sulphur mines. She wrote copiously (in English and Italian) as both a journalist and a biographer.

Her most famous biography was about Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Born Jessie Jane Meriton White, she was the daughter of Thomas White and Jane Teage Meriton of Gosport, Hampshire, England. Thomas was part of the White family of Cowes, Isle of Wight, boat builders for generations, but he moved to the mainland and switched from building boats to building docks and warehouses. His was a religiously strict, non-conformist, household.

It was also an educationally non-conformist household. Unlike almost all middle-class girls growing up in Victorian England, Jessie received an excellent education culminating in studying philosophy with Hugues Felicité Robert de Lamennais at the Sorbonne in Paris between 1852 and 1854.

Also in Paris during those years was Mrs. Emma Roberts who considered herself engaged to Giuseppe Garibaldi. Jessie and Mrs. Roberts became friends and when Mrs. Roberts went to visit Garibaldi first in Nice and then Sardinia, she took Jessie as her companion.

Jessie, like many in Britain, had heard for some time about the atrocities of the Austrian, French and Bourbon dictatorships in various parts of the Italian peninsula. Garibaldi fired her imagination and she dedicated herself to the Unification of Italy.

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