Eleonora Pimentel De Fonseca, marchioness, an Italian martyr, born in Naples in 1758, executed July 20, 1799. She belonged to an illustrious family, and was celebrated for her beauty, poetical talent, and learning. In 1784 she became the wife of the marquis Fonseca and a lady in waiting of Queen Caroline of Naples, whose favor she soon forfeited by her remarks on her majesty's intimate relations with the minister Acton. After the flight of the royal family in 1798, the marchioness was prominent as a partisan of the French, and conspicuous by eloquent public addresses; and on the restoration of the Neapolitan monarchy in 1799 she was sentenced to death on the gallows at the instigation of Queen Caroline, upon the ground of her having contributed to the anti-royalist Monitore Napoletano. Her execution became the signal of wholesale massacres and imprisonments.