Died 25 January 1830, Madrid, Spain | ||
Luigi de' Medici (22 April 1759 - 25 January 1830) was an Italian legal scholar and statesman, who served as prime minister of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. He belonged to the Neapolitan branch of the princely Florentine House of Medici, a cadet branch founded in 1567 by Bernadetto de' Medici after he acquired the vast fief of Ottaviano. A younger son of Giuseppe III de' Medici (fourth Prince of Ottaviano and fourth Duke of Sarno), Luigi de' Medici lived and worked through some of the most tumultuous periods of the Kingdom of Naples: straddling the final stages of the reactionary reforms of Sir John Acton; the short-lived Parthenopean Republic proclaimed in Naples by Napoleon in 1799; the Sanfedismo (its fall); the retreat of the Bourbon court to Palermo under English protection after Napoleon took Naples a second time (1806); their restoration; and the eventual suppression of the Sicilian constitution and autonomy when the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily were unified into the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (1816).