Ximenes was born in
Florence into a noble family: the daughter of and Giulia De Saint Seigne. On her mother's side Ferdinando Panciatichi was involved in introducing various plants into Italy including the first redwood. She studied at Ripoli College. In 1853 she married Marquis Alessandro Anafesto Paulucci, a botanist and son of General
Filippo Paulucci. In 1866 she published her first scientific work on the Pliocene fossil gastropod
Murex veranyi collected in
Val d'Elsa. The ornithologist
Ettore Arrigoni degli Oddi was the husband of her niece. She was able to work amid the acrimonious debate among her fellow malacologists
Carlo de Stefani and
Napoleone Pini. She opposed the excessive splitting of
Jules-René Bourguignat and was interested in ideas on evolution. She described about seventy new species of molluscs and nearly forty mollusc taxa are named in her honour. In 1887, after her husband's death, and ten years after her father died, the Marquise had to abandon her studies as well as her collections so she could devote her energies almost entirely to the administration of her significant family affairs. To do so, she donated her collections of non-marine molluscs (dating back to 1862, when she was just 27 years old) to the Natural History Museum at the
University of Florence and her bird collection of about 1,200 specimens ones to the Municipality of
San Gimignano, Italy. Her herbarium collection of 4,153 specimens belonging to 1,492 different species was donated to the Galileo Galilei Technical Institute. She died on 7 December 1919 in her villa in
Regello. == Selected publications ==