Antonina Uccello

Antonina P. Uccello ( in Italian, and in English) (May 19, 1922 – March 14, 2023), was an American politician who was Mayor of Hartford, Connecticut, from 1967 to 1971.

Life

Uccello was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on May 19, 1922, to parents who had emigrated from the town of Canicattini Bagni, Sicily. She was the second born of five sisters.

She graduated from University of St. Joseph, and pursued graduate studies in law at Trinity College and University of Connecticut. She was also the first woman to be elected mayor of a US state capital.

She ran as a Republican in a mainly Democratic city, and remains the city's last Republican mayor to date. She was re-elected as mayor in 1969, and was subsequently asked by President Richard Nixon to go to Washington D.C. to work in the U.S. Department of Transportation, where she subsequently worked during the successive administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. and died on March 12, 2023, of natural causes.

Honours In 1971 Uccello was knighted Cavaliere della Repubblica by the Italian ambassador in the USA.

She was inducted into the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame in 1999. Ann Street in Hartford, originally named for Ann Sheldon Goodwin in 1815, was renamed Ann Uccello Street in her honor in September 2008. Another street, in the town where her parents were from, Canicattini Bagni, Italy, was named after her in July 2016.