Francesca is the Italian feminine of Francesco (Francis) — from the Latin Franciscus ("Frenchman, free one"). A top-500 US baby name since 2000. Francesca da Rimini (c. 1255-1285) — *Italian noblewoman whose tragic love story with her brother-in-law Paolo Malatesta is told in Canto V of Dante's Inferno (c. 1308-1320); their souls are eternally bound together in the second circle of Hell among the lustful; the passage is among the most-quoted in all of world literature and inspired Tchaikovsky's symphonic poem Francesca da Rimini (1876), Rachmaninoff's opera (1906), Riccardo Zandonai's opera (1914), and Auguste Rodin's sculpture The Kiss (1882). Francesca Albanese (born 1977) — Italian UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories (2022-present). Francesca Capaldi (born 2004) — American child actress; Dog with a Blog. Francesca Marciano — Italian-American novelist. Francesca Schiavone (born 1980) — Italian tennis player; 2010 French Open champion (the first Italian woman to win a Grand Slam singles title). Francesca Eastwood (born 1993) — actress; daughter of Clint Eastwood. Francesca Hayward (born 1992) — Kenyan-British ballerina; Principal of The Royal Ballet (2016); starred in Cats* (2019).
Featured throughout Italian literature and modern arts.
Francesca reduces to one — the number of Dante's Canto V.