 The fourth of six children he was not a 'Marchese' as he was sometimes styled, or a 'Count', but a 'patrizio di Siena', a minor distinction marking the great antiquity of his family.His father married Henrietta Medwin, an Englishwoman.Her father Thomas Medwin was a minor literary figure in Byron's circle, the author of "Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron" and of "The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley"; Medwin was a second cousin on both parents' side of Shelley.