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Linetta Richardson (1880–1975)

Linetta ("Pitzy") Palamidessi de Castelvecchio Richardson was the younger sister of Elisina Tyler. She was born in Pescia, near Lucca, on October 13, 1880, the daughter of Francesco Palamidessi and Contessa Joséphine de Castelvecchio. In July 1903, she moved to London, where she became a private teacher of Italian. In 1915, she was appointed lecturer and head of the Italian department at King’s College London, where she taught between 1916 and 1921. She studied in Rome from May 1919 to July 1920 and received the diploma di abilitazione. On June 1, 1921, she was appointed the Arthur Serena Professor of Italian at the University of Birmingham—the university’s first female professor—where she received a master of arts degree in 1922. She retired in 1946. She married the Rev. Dr. Robert Douglas Richardson (b. 1892), the vicar of Four Oaks and Harborne, the canon of Birmingham Cathedral, and a scholar, on October 1, 1929, in London. She died at her home in Corton Parva, near Warminster, Wiltshire, England, on June 4, 1975.


Philip McNair, "Linetta de Castelvecchio Richardson," Italian Studies 32 (1977): 1–3.

William R. Tyler, formatted and supplemented by Royall Tyler, The Castelvecchio Family (New South Wales, Australia: privately printed, 2014), 214–219.