François Zola (born Francesco Antonio Giuseppe Maria Zolla; 7 August 1796 – 27 March 1847) was an Italian-born French engineer. He designed the

Zola Dam Zola Dam is a dam in Le Tholonet near Aix-en-Provence, France. History The dam was designed by Italian-born engineer François Zola, the father of novelist Émile Zola. Its construction was initially rejected by Gaston Alexandre Auguste, Marqui ...

, creating Lac Zola near Le Tholonet in

Aix-en-Provence Aix-en-Provence, or simply Aix, is a List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, city and Communes of France, commune in southern France, about north of Marseille. A former capital of Provence, it is the Subprefectures in France, s ...

. Zola was an Italian engineer with some

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

ancestry, who was born in

Venice Venice ( ; ; , formerly ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto Regions of Italy, region. It is built on a group of 118 islands that are separated by expanses of open water and by canals; portions of the city are li ...

in 1795; his mother was French. He lived in Paris with his wife Émilie Aubert when their son, the author

Émile Zola Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola (, ; ; 2 April 184029 September 1902) was a French novelist, journalist, playwright, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of Naturalism (literature), naturalism, and an important contributor to ...

, was born in 1840. The family moved to Aix-en-Provence when Émile was three years old. François died four years later, in 1847.

References

1796 births 1847 deaths Engineers from Venice People from Aix-en-Provence Italian emigrants to France Italian people of Greek descent French people of Greek descent {{France-engineer-stub