Santino Balmelli (1801-1855)

Santino Balmelli was born in Guidino Inferiore (a hamlet in the municipality of Calprino, since 1929 municipality of Paradiso, Canton Ticino) on 24 May 1801 to a family originally from Comologno, in the Onsernone Valley, who had moved to the Lugano area at least since the early 18th century. He was the son of Giuseppe Robusto Balmelli (1769-1846) and Lucia Gianini (1765-1825). In 1784 his father, Giuseppe Robusto Balmelli, lived in Luigi Morosini's farmhouse in Calprino (Lugano, Archivio Diocesano).
In 1818 Santino Balmelli left for Odessa, where he worked as kamennago dela master (a term, most often recurring in the form kamennych del master, which can be translated as "foreman" or "stonemason"), a job he also did in the city of Nikolaev. In 1822 he married Rosina Hornstein (1801-1876) in Odessa, with whom he had ten children, six girls and four boys, born between 1823 and 1847 (Bern, Swiss Federal Archives). Santino Balmelli worked for the Černomorskoe Intendanstvo (part of the Glavnoe upravlenie Černomorskogo flota i portov v g. Nikolaeve, i.e. the General Directorate of the Black Sea Fleet and Ports in the city of Nikolaev). After his death, his widow received 100 roubles, a one-off payment, from the fund set up to provide financial assistance to members of the Naval Department (Morskoe vedomstvo) and their families (Morskoj sbornik 1857, pp. 67, 69). The descendants of this branch of the Balmelli family settled in Ukraine, but continued to pay the focatico tax to the municipality of Lugano until at least 1881 (Lugano, Archivio storico della Città di Lugano, 313/49, 358/84, 359/13, 359/143, 361/42, 361/65, 361/99) and retained their Swiss citizenship until the first decades of the 20th century.

Archival sources
_Bellinzona, Archivio di Stato del Cantone Ticino (ASTi), Libro dei ruoli di Lugano.
_Bern, Swiss Federal Archives (AFS), Archives of the Swiss Consulate in Odessa.
_Kyiv, Balmeli family private archives.
_Kyiv, The SSU Sectoral State Archive, fonds 6, inventory 4, dossier 732, pp. 72-74, 85; fonds 5, dossier 917, pp. 110-120.
_Kyiv, Central State Archive of Public Associations and Ukrainian Studies, fund 263, inventory 1, dossier 49305, vols. 1-2.
_Lugano, Archivio Diocesano, Parish Registers of Lugano (San Lorenzo) and Pambio Noranco.
_Lugano, Archivio Storico della Città di Lugano.
_Odessa, Odessa State Archives, parish metric books, 1882, 1904.
_Porza, private archives of lawyer Roberto Balmelli.

Bibliographic sources
_‘Morskoj sbornik’, vol. 27, 1857, no. 2 (February), pp. 67, 69.

Author: Iryna Balmeli
Version: 20.02.2025