Vittoria Aganoor

Vittoria Aganoor.

Vittoria Aganoor (26 May 1855 – 9 April 1910) was an Italian poet with Armenian ancestry.

She was born in Padova, the seventh child of Edoardo Aganoor and Giuseppina Pacini. Edoardo Aganoor's family was of wealthy Armenian nobility. They had moved to Persia in the eleventh century, settling in Julfa. Later on, the family, acting on the advice of Mechitarist fathers, migrated to France, where they began to live in Paris. In France, they founded two notable educational institutions for Armenian nobility: The Collège Raphaël in Paris, followed by the Collegio Moorat in Venice.^[1]

Early life

Vittoria's parents married in 1847 and moved to Padova. There they took up residence in the 'Casa degli Armeni', or 'House of the Armenians', in Prato della Valle. It was here that Vittoria, along with her four sisters, spent her childhood and adolescence.^[1]

Many Italian celebrities, such as Andrea Maffei or Antonio Fogazzaro, visited their home when she was a child. In 1876 she went living to Naples, where she met Enrico Nencioni, who helped her with her poetry, although she wrote letters more often to Domenico Gnoli. She was very emotionally dependent on her family because of her depressive moods and although she was a precocious writer, she did not publish her first book, Leggenda eterna, until 1900. In 1901, she married Guido Pompilj and went to Perugia. She died from cancer, in Rome, on April 9, 1910. aged 54. Thanks to her husband, she became very famous after her death.

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