GORDOSA [BOTIBOL], Fanny (b Soho Square, London, 7 August 1827; d Netherne Asylum, Merstham, Surrey, 21 February 1910)

This chapter presents a biography of mid- to late-19th-century singer Fanny Gordosa. At the Teatro dei Floridi in 1853, Sra Fanny Gardosa was seen singing as prima donna in I due Foscari, alongside Coletti, Agostino dall'Ami and Pietro Bacelli. In 1854, she was indeed at Odessa singing Lucia di Lammermoor with Tito Palmieri, Rigoletto with Ferlotti, in July Il trovatore, then I due Foscari, Maria di Rohan, and Pacini's Buondelmonte, before, in spring 1855, she is back at La Scala, singing Gisela in I Lombardi and Berta in Il profeta. Back in Europe, in 1860, Fanny sang in La traviata at the Teatro Regio of Turin, but her next engagement was to be much further afield. Whatever Fanny Gordosa was or wasn't in her private life, she had been an effective and busy operatic soprano who was well enough considered at the dawn of the 1860s to be deemed worthy of inclusion in Francesco Regli's fine book.