Giovanni Battista Gigliucci, father of Mario Gigliucci, was born into a family of minor nobility in Fermo, Italy in 1815. By the age of 19 months, Giovanni Battista had lost both parents and was raised by his paternal grandmother. Before turning 20, he had obtained a sovereign decree declaring him of age to manage the family estate.
On 22 November 1843, Giovanni married Clara Anastasia Novello, a renown English sopranist, in Middlesex, England. The couple settled in Fermo where they had four children: Giovanni (1844), Porzia (1845), Mario (1847), and Valeria (1849).
In 1848, Giovanni was appointed to serve in the first constitutional Parliament called by the newly elected Pope Pious IX, but in 1849, the Gigliucci estate in Fermo was confiscated by French troops and the family was forced to leave. They were not able to return to their home until 1860, after the annexation with the region of Piedmont.
In 1861, under the newly unified Regno d’Italia, Giovanni was elected senator, a post he held until his death in 1893.
Valeria Gigliucci (Mario’s sister) regarding their grandfather, Count Giovanni Battista Gigliucci:
Count Gigliucci was an only son, orphan from the age of nineteen months, and brought up by his paternal grandmother and his uncle, Mgr. Gigliucci, who died soon after his elder brother. During this long minority the family property was managed and mismanaged by his tutor, a learned priest but incapable of such work, which needed instead very able hands, to repair the damage it had suffered, together with most other property all over Italy, during that colossal upheaval, the French Revolution, when Count Gigliucci’s grandfather, then head of the family, was taken hostage by the French and kept for a time in the fortress of Ancona. To enable the young proprietor to manage his own estates he, with his grandmother’s full consent, obtained a sovereign decree declaring him of age before he was twenty – and soon after his grandmother died, at past ninety. His only sister was in a convent, founded some centuries before by her family, of which she became subsequently Superior, remaining so until her death.