Maddalena lombardini sirmen biography

Maddalena Laura Lombardini Sirmen (born 9 December 1745)

Born in Venice, Maddalena Lombardini was the daughter of Pietro Lombardini and his wife, Gasparina Gambirasi, said to be impoverished members of the nobility.

Impoverished they must have been, because in 1753 their daughter was accepted into the Ospedale dei Mendicanti--like other Venetian ospedali (hospitals), the Hospital of the Mendicants was a charitable organization focused on providing care for the sick and the elderly, and housing orphans and the poor. 

In Venice, these institutions frequently provided musical training for the orphans they housed, the performances of these young musicians earning money for the hospitals.

(The most famous of such institutional musical groups was at the Ospedale della Pietà, where the composer Antonio Vivaldi held a variety of positions in the early eighteenth century.)

Maddalena Lombardini studied violin, showing enough promise that she was allowed to leave th