The biography of the Count Giovanni Querini

Giovanni Querini is the last descendant of the Venetian patrician family of the Santa Maria Formosa branch, otherwise known as 'dei Gigli'. 

Giovanni was born in Venice on May 5, 1799, to Alvise and Maria Teresa Lippomano. He is the only son, after three brothers who died as children and a sister, Caterina. 

During his youth he brilliantly completed his high school studies and lived permanently in the palace of Santa Maria Formosa with his mother Maria and his sister. 

Despite fragile health during adolescence, he studies both scientific and humanistic subjects: learns Greek and Latin, and delves into numismatics, heraldry, natural history, and botany. Horseback riding and fencing are his only pastimes.

He briefly followed his father on his travels, also training in Milan and Bologna, later graduating from the University of Padua in utroque iure – today's Law – In 1820. 

In his mature years, he achieves financial independence by acquiring his uncle Girolamo's inheritance, and with the death of his father he improves his farmland income and updates cultivation and marketing techniques. 

Giovanni became a shrewd and modern agricultural and industrial entrepreneur with high civic sensitivity. 

His family's wealth gave him the opportunity to live in comfort, to travel in Italy and abroad, and the freedom to cultivate his passions: horses, natural history collections, science, medicine, and electric lighting, inspired by the Universal Expositions in London and Paris.

During the 1850s, he was conferred the position of honorary member and president of the Ateneo Veneto and then appointed honorary member of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere e Arti in 1859. 

He died on May 25, 1869, of heart problems, bequeathing all his possessions to the city of Venice.