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.

Unlike almost all middle-class girls growing up in Victorian England, Jessie received an excellent education culminating in studying philosophy with Hugues Félicité Robert de Lamennais at the Sorbonne in Paris between 1852 and 1854.

Upon her return to London in the spring of 1855, Jessie applied to medical schools with the hope of becoming a doctor – some (Edwin Pratt in Pioneer Women in Victoria’s Reign, for one) have said she was the first woman in England to do so.

[6] She wrote newspaper articles explaining the issues in Italy, gave lectures and raised funds for the Italian cause in northern England and Scotland.

She was treated as a celebrity, toured the area and successfully deflected attention away from Mazzini, who was working on a clandestine expedition to break patriots out of a Bourbon prison near Naples.

[9] In the Fall of 1858 Jessie and Alberto went to New York City to continue lecturing and fund-raising; she to English speaking audiences and he to Italian speakers.

Spring 1860 found them in Lugano, Switzerland, from where they rushed to Genoa to be part of the second wave of volunteers going to Sicily to join Garibaldi in his lightning-fast conquest of the Bourbon-controlled southern half of Italy.

Jessie's research into pellagra lasted for ten years, and her findings showed that even such simple, readily available diet supplements as two glasses of red wine per week reduced the effects of the illness.

Her report, La miseria in Napoli ("The Poor of Naples"), was published in 1877, and is cited in timelines of important events in southern Italy.

(see The New History of the Italian South, edited by Robert Lumley and Jonathan Morris, 1997) The third was research into working conditions in the Sicilian sulphur mines.

Giosuè Carducci, the 1906 Nobel Laureate for Literature, said: Jessie White Mario 'is a great woman to whom we Italians owe a lot.'