On 13 September 1990, Count Guglielmo Coronini Cronberg died in Vienna: his passing marked the end of one of the oldest noble family lineages of Gorizia. According to documentary evidence, the origin of the Coronini family, counts of the Holy Roman Empire, dates back to the 10th century.
The first to arrive in Gorizia in the 16th century, hailing from Bergamo, was Cipriano the Elder, whom Emperor Ferdinand I granted feud, nobility and coat of arms in 1548. We know that the family descended from the ancient lineage of the Knights von Cronberg, originally from the principality of Mainz.
The Coronini family included figures of great prestige, closely bound to the history of Gorizia and the Habsburg court, such as men of arms, men of letters, clergymen and diplomats.
Guglielmo, born during a holiday in Ruffrè, in the province of Trento, on 7 July 1905, was the third son of Count Carlo and Countess Olga Westphalen von Fürstenberg (1868-1958). Before him came Nicoletta (1896-1984) and Francesco Giuseppe (1899-1964).
His education was provided by a private tutor up to middle school, then he continued his studies at the “Vittorio Emanuele III” grammar school in Gorizia, but took his high school exams as a private student. In the 1920s, he went to Florence to take a course at the Regio Istituto Superiore Agrario e Forestale (Royal College of Agriculture and Forestry). In 1929, his parents allowed him to go to Munich to enrol in the Faculty of Philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University, supporting him in what was his true vocation, the study of art history. In 1936-37 he enrolled in a law degree course in Florence, finishing his thesis in 1940.
His time in the Tuscan capital and his, albeit shorter, stay in Munich were extremely important for his education and his inclination towards collecting. In Florence, Count Coronini had come into contact with the city's artistic and cultural milieu, thanks in part to his friendship with Marquis Filippo Serlupi di Crescenzi, to whom he was united by a distant family relationship and a common passion for antiques.
Over the years, he also made the acquaintance of illustrious scholars and art historians such as Antonio Morassi, Rodolfo Pallucchini, Giuseppe Fiocco, Roberto Longhi, Bernard Berenson, Francesco Valcanover, Hermann Voss and Georg Richter.
Numerous journeys made from an early age, in addition to his studies, were often undertaken to look after the family business but also to purchase precious objects. Documents show that, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, Count Coronini devoted himself to the purchase of many antiques in various parts of Italy and Europe. He was also in contact with important museums and prestigious institutions such as the National Gallery in Washington, the Institut Royal du Patrimoine Artistique in Brussels, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Akademie der bildenden Künste and the Österreichische Galerie in Vienna, the Musée Nationaux in Malmaison, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Narodna Galerija in Ljubljana.
Although Guglielmo Coronini was considered a scholar of proven repute and competence, his written output is not very extensive. He devoted himself passionately to genealogical research, historical studies on the politics of Joseph II, the Austrian land register, the provincial states of Gorizia, the history of local culture and construction, the Counts of Gorizia, and the Patriarchate of Aquileia, not to mention the entire corpus of partial drafts, manuscripts, notes, lists and transcriptions of documents pertaining to his great historical work entitled Gorizia Comitale, a vast collection of documents on the County of Gorizia (from its origins to the 16th century) that remained unfinished. He also wrote a number of essays on art history, including an unpublished study on the painter Giorgio Liberale, and curated some of the major exhibitions held in Gorizia after World War II: The 18th century in Gorizia in 1956, Giuseppe Tominz's exhibition in 1966 and Maria Teresa and the 18th century in Gorizia in 1982.
In 1969, he was a founding member and the first president of the Gorizia section of the national association Italia Nostra, which deals with the protection of the nation's historical, artistic and environmental heritage, a position he held with great commitment and tireless dedication until 1987. The organisation published some of his important works: Gorizia 1915-18, Gorizia ottocentesca (19th-century Gorizia) and Gorizia viva. I secoli e le ore della città. (Gorizia alive. Centuries and hours in the city).
As he had always wished, Guglielmo Coronini Cronberg rests in the tranquillity of the family chapel, annexed to the Palazzo Coronini, a peaceful place to visit for all the people who knew him and for the tourists who, today, come to admire his splendid home and the beauty of its park.
