Bianconi, The King of the Irish Roads

The man known to History as Charles Bianconi, and in his lifetime known as the King of the Irish Roads, was born Carlo Bianconi in Lombardy, Italy, in 1786. When he was 16, although his family were well off, he was apprenticed to a seller of prints who was going to England - chiefly to remove him from the village where he was born and brought up to distance him from a young lady to whom he was getting too close and who was engaged to another! So he and three companions travelled with their ...