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The princedom of San Donato was created by Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, for the Russian Italophile Anatole Demidov in 1840, so that Demidov could marry Mathilde Bonaparte without her losing her title of Princess.
Leopold II was Grand Duke of Tuscany (1824–1859).
Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country in Eastern Europe and North Asia. At 17,125,200 square kilometres (6,612,100 sq mi), Russia is by a considerable margin the largest country in the world by area, covering more than one-eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area, and the ninth most populous, with about 146.79 million people as of 2019, including Crimea. About 77% of the population live in the western, European part of the country. Russia's capital, Moscow, is one of the largest cities in the world and the second largest city in Europe; other major cities include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a wide range of environments and landforms. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares land borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia and North Korea. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk and the U.S. state of Alaska across the Bering Strait. However, Russia recognises two more countries that border it, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both of which are internationally recognized as parts of Georgia.
Mathilde Laetitia Wilhelmine Bonaparte, Princesse Française, Princess of San Donato, was a French princess and salonnière. She was a daughter of Napoleon's brother Jérôme Bonaparte and his second wife, Catharina of Württemberg, daughter of King Frederick I of Württemberg.
The title was never recognised in Russia. It was named after Villa San Donato, the Demidov family's villa near Florence.
The Villa San Donato is a Palladian palace built by Russian industrialist Nikolay Demidov on 42 hectares of marshland to the north of Florence at Polverosa which he had bought from the Catholic church, after he was made Russia's ambassador to the court of Tuscany. The first stone was laid on 27 June 1827 and construction was completed in 1831. It includes an estates with rivers, lakes, churches, a menagerie, a silk factory, a zoo, gardens and a railway. The designs were by Giovan Battista Silvestri, architect to the Uffizi.
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with 383,084 inhabitants in 2013, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.
