Doctor and Benefactor

Francesco Corradi

Born in 1806 to Benedetto Corradi and Anna Bobone, he began his studies of Latinity at that time in his homeland college, which he completed privately under the guidance of Fr Gerolamo Rolleri of the Pious Schools.
He obtained a degree in Medicine in Turin in 1829 and, after the necessary practice, he spent six years in Ceriana as a doctor.

When he went to Genoa, when cholera was raging there and in nearby places, he presented himself to the Governor to ask to be sent where his work was most needed. Then he was sent to Montobbio, and then, during a recrudescence of the disease, he lent his work to Genoa, where he was not immune from the epidemic.

He was called to take care of the children in the Carmine kindergarten in Genoa; he saw in the kindergartens the most precious institution for the education of the people, and he proposed to endow his city with perennial benefits.

For this reason, he came to Sanremo in 1862, when he was already near the end of his life due to a liver disease, which had been afflicting him for many years, and deposited in the deeds of the notary Giuseppe Nota his will, with which he left his entire patrimony of about 230,000 lire to the Municipality of Sanremo for the establishment of a kindergarten in the city, for which he had drawn up regulations and basic rules of administration.
He also left about one thousand three hundred volumes of science and literature, so that a public library could be opened in Sanremo, which would later become the current Civic Library.

He died on 22nd November 1865 in Genoa and was buried in the cemetery of Staglieno, but a few years later his remains were moved to Sanremo and were buried in a solemn ceremony in the cemetery of La Foce on 10th January 1870.

The house on the right is the Corradi Kindergarten under construction)The following year the new nursery school "Francesco Corradi" was officially inaugurated, erected as a moral institution by royal decree of Vittorio Emanuele II.

Actually it already existed in Sanremo, in the rooms of the old boarding school, in Piazza G.D. Cassini, a kindergarten, inaugurated on 28th December 1853, (a marble plaque had been affixed at the entrance), supported by a company of shareholders, with the help of the Municipality and the Mauriziano Hospital; but, because of the Corradi bequest, the Administration of the homonymous kindergarten, after the transfer of the mobile effects of the municipal kindergarten, was able to open the new kindergarten in the specially built building, which was inaugurated on 28th December 1870.

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