Cesare Maldini - footballer and coach

Enjoyed success with AC Milan as player and manager

Cesare Maldini took Italy to the quarter-finals of the 1998
World Cup in France after success with the Under-21s

The footballer and coach Cesare Maldini, who won four Serie A titles and an historic European Cup as a centre half with AC Milan and later coached the club with success in domestic and European football, was born on this day in 1932 in Trieste.

When, under Maldini’s captaincy, Milan beat Benfica 2–1 at Wembley Stadium in London in May 1963, they became the first Italian club to win the European Cup and Maldini the first Italian captain to lift the trophy.

Maldini’s international career included an 18-month spell as coach of the Italy national team, during which the Azzurri reached the quarter-finals of the 1998 World Cup. He had earlier won three consecutive European championships as coach of the Italy Under-21s.

He is the father of Paolo Maldini, the former AC Milan defender whose record-breaking career spanned 25 years and included no fewer than five winner’s medals from the European Cup and its successor, the Champions League. Cesare’s grandson, Christian - Paolo’s son - is also a professional player for Pro Piacenza in Serie C.

As a child, Cesare Maldini was largely brought up by his mother, Maria. His father, Albino Maldini, who originated from Padua, was a merchant seaman who was often at sea for long periods. The family also owned a small bakery.

Cesare Maldini was captain of the Milan team
 who became Italy's first European champions

Maldini trained for a career as a dental technician but by the age of 20 had made his debut for his home town club, Triestina, then in Serie A. The next season he was appointed the team’s captain.

After two seasons with Triestina, Maldini joined AC Milan, making his debut in September 1954 against his former team, coincidentally. A strong Milan team that included included the great Swedish forwards Nils Liedholm and Gunnar Nordahl, and the Uruguay-born playmaker Juan Alberto Schiaffino, won 4-0.

Maldini was unawed by playing in such company and soon became a regular starter, winning his first league title in his debut season.

He went on to make more than 400 appearances for the club in all competitions, keeping the captain’s armband for five years after being appointed in 1961. He was succeeded in the role by another rossoneri great, Gianni Rivera.

Milan won the European Cup under the coaching of Nereo Rocco, who also hailed from Trieste and formed a strong bond with Maldini. When Rocco left to take charge of Torino in 1966, he took his trusted centre half with him, ending Maldini’s 12-year association with Milan.

Maldini with Enzo Bearzot, to whom he was assistant head
coach at the 1982 World Cup in Spain, which Italy won

After only season in Turin, however, the pair returned to San Siro, Rocco resuming as coach with Maldini his assistant.  In tandem, they won the European Cup again in 1967, defeating Johann Cruyff and his Ajax teammates in the final.

For a while, Maldini was head coach, with Rocco as technical director, and he won the European Cup-Winners’ Cup and the Coppa Italia in the 1972-73 season. Yet he was still sacked the following season after Milan  failed to mount a credible challenge for the Championship.

Maldini went on to coach Foggia, Ternana and then Parma, where he discovered Carlo Ancelotti and won promotion to Serie B, before graduating to international football as assistant to Enzo Bearzot on the Azzurri coaching staff. Two years later, the were in the technical area as Italy won the 1982 World Cup in Spain.

It was as coach of the Italy Under-21s that Maldini found his métier. In his 10 years in that job, as well as steering the Azzurrini to three consecutive European titles in 1992, 1994 and 1996, he brought through countless future stars, including Fabio Cannavaro, Christian Panucci, Filippo Inzaghi, Christian Vieri, Gianluigi Buffon and Francesco Totti.

Paolo Maldini followed his father in
signing for AC Milan

He took over as coach of the senior side when Arrigo Sacchi resigned midway through the 1996-97 season.  It was an achievement to qualify for the 1998 World Cup given the difficult situation Maldini inherited, yet after clinching their place at the finals in France via a play-off, Maldini’s Azzurri exceeded expectations by reaching the last eight.

They remained unbeaten, in fact, going out in a penalty shoot-out to the hosts and eventual champions, France, after a goalless draw in Saint-Denis.

Despite this creditable performance, Maldini was heavily criticised in the Italian media for being too defensive in his outlook, commentators complaining about the omission of the brilliantly talented Gianfranco Zola from his squad and his reluctance to have Roberto Baggio and Alessandro Del Piero, two creative players he did take, on the field at the same time.

As a result, Maldini resigned at the end of the tournament.  After a brief return to the bench at AC Milan for the last few games of the 2000-01 season, he accepted the head coach position with the Paraguay national team for the 2002 World Cup, for which they had already qualified.

At 70 he was at the time the oldest coach to be in charge of a national side at a World Cup tournament. Paraguay were good enough to reach the last 16, where they were unlucky to lose to a last-minute goal against Germany, who went on to reach the final.

Maldini remained in football as a scout and then a TV pundit. He died in Milan in 2016, his funeral at the Basilica di Sant’Ambrogio attended by many former players.  His widow, Marisa, passed away a few months later.

Trieste's vast Piazza Unità d'Italia is the focal point
of the port city in northeastern Italy

Travel tip:

Maldini’s home city, the port of Trieste, capital of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, did not officially become part of the Italian Republic until 1954. It had been disputed territory for centuries and after it was granted to Italy in 1920, thousands of the resident Slovenians left. The final border with Yugoslavia was settled in 1975 with the Treaty of Osimo. The area today is one of the most prosperous in Italy and Trieste is a lively, cosmopolitan city and a major centre for trade and ship building.  It also has a coffee house culture dating back to the Hapsburg era. Caffè Tommaseo, in Piazza Nicolò Tommaseo, is the oldest coffee house in the city, dating back to 1830.

The atrium of the Basilica di Sant'Ambrogio in Milan,
where Cesare Maldini's funeral took place

Travel tip:

One of the most ancient churches in Milan, the Basilica di Sant’Ambrogio was built by Saint Ambrose himself between 379–386, while he was Bishop of Milan. One of several new churches he had constructed, it was built in an area where numerous martyrs of the Roman persecutions had been buried. The first name of the church, in fact, was the Basilica Martyrum. It was only later that it was renamed in Saint Ambrose’s honour. Initially, the basilica was outside the city of Milan, but over time the city grew up around it. In 789, a monastery was established within the grounds and for a while two separate religious communities shared the basilica. Its two towers symbolise this division.


More reading:

Enzo Bearzot, the pipe-smoking maestro behind Italy's 1982 World Cup glory

The brilliant career of Paolo Maldini

How Arrigo Sacchi's tactics transformed Italian football

Also on this day:

The Feast Day of Saint Agatha of Sicily

1578: The death of painter Giovanni Battista Moroni

1964: The birth of footballer and coach Carolina Morace

(Picture credits: Piazza Unità by Welleschik; Basilica by Óðinn via Creative Commons)


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Marisa Pavan - actress

Twin sister of tragic star Pier Angeli

Marisa Pavan (left) with Anna
Magnani in The Rose Tattoo

The actress Marisa Pavan, whose twin sister Pier Angeli was a Hollywood star in the 1950s and 1960s, was born on this day in 1932 as Maria Luisa Pierangeli in Cagliari, Sardinia.

Pavan’s career ran parallel with that of her sister, who was born 20 minutes before her, but she rejected the re-invention as an ultra-glamorous starlet that Pier Angeli underwent within the Hollywood studio system.

She turned roles down when she felt they did not have enough substance and did not hesitate to sack agents if she felt they were putting her forward for unsuitable parts.  She refused to sign up to any one studio.

Her biggest success was The Rose Tattoo, the 1955 film adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play in which she played the daughter of the central character, played by Anna Magnani, one of postwar Italian cinema’s most respected actresses.

Magnani won an Oscar for Best Actress for her portrayal of a Sicilian widow, with Pavan receiving a nomination for best supporting actress at the Academy Awards and although that award went to someone else she did have the substantial compensation of winning a Golden Globe for the role.

The Pierangeli family had left Sardinia for Rome when the twins were three years old as their father, Luigi, pursued his career as an architect. Life began to change for the family in 1948 when her sister, then still known by her real name, Anna Maria Pierangeli, was approached by the famous actor and director, Vittorio De Sica, while walking along fashionable Via Veneto, and asked if she might be interested in a part.

Pavan with her husband, the French actor
Jean-Pierre Aumont, in 1965

She won an award at the Venice Film Festival for the role De Sica gave her and it was not long before the twins, their younger sister Patrizia and their mother were leaving for the United States to support Anna Maria’s new career in Hollywood. The only sadness was that they travelled without the girls’ father, Luigi, who had died a short time before they were due to leave.

Marisa, who had always been more studious than her sister, had no intention of becoming an actress herself, devoting herself to studying languages and journalism.  She nonetheless did follow Anna into the movie business, but only after claiming she was ‘tricked’ into an audition by the producer Albert Romolo ‘Cubby’ Broccoli.

Broccoli invited her to look round the Twentieth Century Fox studios and while visiting one set he gave her a costume to try on and asked her if she would like to show off her language skills by singing a song in French. Thinking it was just for fun she obliged.

The penny dropped only when she spotted an actress she recognised, Anne Bancroft, wearing the same costume. It turned out that among a small number of people on the set was the director John Ford, who hired her for a part in his 1952 comedy drama, What Price Glory, starring James Cagney and Corinne Calvet.

Although she agreed to have a shorter, catchier name for professional purposes - she chose Pavan after a Jewish soldier her family hid from the authorities during the Second World War - that was one of the few ways in her career resembled that of Pier Angeli.

Marisa Pavan has campaigned for
Alzheimer's research in recent years

Always keen to take parts that demanded something of her acting ability, she played a blind American woman in Down Three Dark Streets (1954), a Native American girl in Drum Beat (1954), the Italian noblewoman Catherine de’ Medici in Diane (1956), a French lady at the Court of Louis XVI in John Paul Jones (1959) and a Jewish woman in ancient Israel in Solomon and Sheba (1959).

Married in Santa Barbara in 1956 to the French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont, she raised two sons, Jean-Claude and Patrick, while continuing to act, diversifying into television in the 1960s and 1970s.

After the tragedy of Pier Angeli’s death from a barbiturates overdose in 1971, which continued to work, but increasingly in France, after she and her husband moved to Gassin, in the South of France.

Once her career was effectively over, she devoted much time to URMA (Unis pour la Recherche sur la Maladie d'Alzheimer), an organisation she created to support and finance research laboratories working to find treatments for Alzheimer’s.

She remained close to her sister Patrizia, also an actress, who worked in Paris dubbing movies. Her husband died in 2001.

The old town of Castello stands above modern Cagliari

Travel tip:

Cagliari is Sardinia’s main port and an industrial centre it is now also a popular tourist destination, with tree-lined boulevards and a charming historic centre, known as Castello, with limestone buildings that prompted DH Lawrence, whose first view of the city was from the sea as ‘a confusion of domes, palaces and ornamental facades seemingly piled on top of one another’, to call it 'the white Jerusalem'.

The tree-line Via Vittorio Veneto in Rome

Travel tip:

Rome’s Via Vittorio Veneto, more often known simply as the Via Veneto, is traditionally one of the most famous, elegant, and exclusive streets in the city, the home of many expensive hotels and of chic cafes where the famous and those who wanted to be famous would hang out, particularly in the 1950s and 60s. Much of the action in Federico Fellini's classic 1960 film La Dolce Vita took place in the Via Veneto area.  The street was actually named to commemorate a the victory of Italian forces at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto towards the end of the First World War.

More reading:

The brilliance of Oscar winner Anna Magnani

How Fellini became Italy's most famous film director

Marcello Mastroianni - star who immortalised Rome's Trevi Fountain

Also on this day:

1918: The death in action of World War One fighter pilot Francesco Baracca

1932: The birth of Hollywood film star Pier Angeli

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Germano Mosconi – sports writer and presenter

Short-tempered journalist who became the news

Broadcaster became an unintentional
internet phenomenon

Germano Mosconi, who became a well-known television personality, was born on this day in 1932 in San Bonifacio in the Veneto.

Mosconi became notorious for his short temper and swearing on air and was regarded as a bit of a character on local television. But he became known all over Italy and throughout the world after a video of him someone posted anonymously on the internet went viral.

In the 1980s Mosconi delivered sports reports on Telenuovo in Verona and in 1982 he received the Cesare d’Oro international award for journalistic merit.

But he later became known for his excessive swearing and blaspheming. The anonymous video showed his irate reactions to various problems he encountered while broadcasting, such as people unexpectedly entering the studio, background noises and illegible writing on the news sheets he received.

His use of swearwords, blasphemy and insults in both Italian and Venetian dialect and his other humorous antics made the video compulsive viewing all over the world.

Internet forums discussing Mosconi appeared and Mosconi fan clubs were set up.

However, the sports journalist did not relish his notoriety and declined every request for an interview related to the video.

Away from television, he edited the German-language magazine Gardasee Zeitung, dedicated to tourists visiting Lake Garda, and worked for the newspapers Il Gazzettino and L’Arena in Verona.

Mosconi died in Verona in 2012 at the age of 79, following a long illness. He left a wife, Elsa, and one daughter, Margherita.

The cathedral in San Bonifacio

Travel tip:

San Bonifacio, where Mosconi was born, is a town in the province of Verona about 25 kilometres to the east of the city of Verona. It borders the municipality of Soave, where the famous white wine is produced. San Bonifacio’s main sights are the seventh century Abbey of St Peter with its imposing 12th century bell tower and the 12th century cathedral.

Travel tip:

Verona is famous as the city of Romeo and Juliet and for opera. Mosconi worked as a broadcaster there and also as a journalist on L’Arena, which was founded in 1866, before the Veneto became part of the Kingdom of Italy, and is one of the oldest newspapers in Italy. Named after the Roman amphitheatre in Piazza Bra, which hosts concerts and operas every summer, the newspaper is now based in San Martino Buon Albergo, a suburb of Verona.

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Valentino Garavani - fashion icon

Designer favoured by the world's best dressed women

Valentino Garavani became interested in fashion
while still at primary school

The fashion designer best known simply as Valentino was born in Voghera, a town about 70km (43 miles) south of Milan in the province of Pavia, on this day in 1932.

The favourite designer of the world’s best dressed women from the 1960s onwards, he built up a business that he eventually sold for $300 million.

Born Valentino Clemente Ludovico Garavani, he became interested in fashion while still in primary school. After working initially for his aunt Rosa, with the financial support of his parents he moved to Paris to pursue his interest, studying at the École des Beaux-Arts and at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne.

His first taste of working life came in the salons of Jean Dessès and Guy Laroche.  Armed with the knowledge and experience he gained at the feet of two French masters, he left Paris in 1959 to set up his first fashion house in Rome, on the fashionable Via Condotti. He quickly gained kudos for his bright red dresses, in a shade that became widely known as "Valentino red."

In July 1960, Valentino met Giancarlo Giammetti at the Café de Paris on the Via Veneto in Rome. Giammetti, a little younger than Valentino and an architecture student, gave Valentino a lift home in his Fiat, starting a friendship that turned into a business partnership and a romance. The two met again on Capri 10 days later, after which Giammetti quit his studies to become Valentino's business partner. He was faced with the immediate task of saving his new friend from bankruptcy after a disastrous first year.

Giancarlo Giammetti

Together, the pair put the business on its feet, developed Valentino SpA into an international brand. Valentino made his international debut in 1962, at the Pitti Palace in Florence, which brought his designs to the attention of socialites and aristocratic women around the world.

Within a short time, Valentino's designs were considered to be at the very top of Italian couture. His client list included Queen Paola of Belgium, the movie stars Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn, and the Americian First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy.

After the assassination of her husband, the US president John F Kennedy, it was Valentino to whom Jackie Kennedy turned to design the dresses in black and white that she wore for a year after her husband’s death.  When she remarried to Aristotle Onassis in 1968, Valentino designed her white wedding dress.

Valentino opened his first ready-to-wear shops in Milan and Rome and kept his ties with Florence but spent much of the 1970s in New York, where in addition to his friendship with Jackie Kennedy his friends included the artist Andy Warhol and Vogue’s editor-in-chief Diana Freeland.

Valentino and Giammetti in
the the 1960s

In the 1980s, he launched the first Valentino line in children’s clothes as well as a collection of clothing for young adults which he named Oliver, after one of many pet pugs.

In 1989, he opened the Accademia Valentino, designed by architect Tommaso Ziffer, near his first workshop in Rome, for the presentation of art exhibitions. The next year, encouraged by their friend Elizabeth Taylor, he and Giammetti created LIFE, an organisation to support of AIDS-related patients, in association with the Accademia.

Valentino became known in the fashion industry as The Last Emperor, and he and Giammetti have become renowned for their extravagant lifestyle. 

Although in times they ceased to be a couple in a romantic sense in the early 1970s, they have remained inseparable as friends, maintaining at least 10 homes around the world, including an historic villa on Via Appia Antica in Rome, a chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland, an apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, overlooking central park, a 19^th century mansion in Holland Park, London, and a Louis XIII château near Paris. They also have a 152-foot yacht. All their properties have extensive art collections.

Valentino's 152-foot yacht

Aside from fashion, Valentino has an obsession with dogs, specifically pugs. After he lost Oliver, he acquired six others, named Milton, Maggie, Maude, Monty, Margot, and Molly. When they travel with him in his 14-seat jet, each dog has their own seat. On arrival at the airport, wherever in the world it is, Valentino always arranges three cars to meet him – one for himself and Giammetti, another for their luggage and staff and and a third for the five of the six pugs. The sixth, Maude, always travels with Valentino.

In 2007, Valentino announced that he would hold his final haute couture show the following year. This show, at the Musée Rodin in Paris, featured many of Valentino’s most famous models, including Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer and Eva Herzigova.

Since then, Valentino has worked only on commissions for favoured individual clients, such as actress Anne Hathaway's wedding dress in 2012 and the bridal gown worn by Princess Madeleine of Sweden the following year.

Travel tip:

Voghera is a town in Lombardy with slightly fewer than 40,000 residents. It has a 14th century castle, an 11th century Cathedral and a Museum of History that has on display a car belonging to General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, who was killed by the Mafia in 1982, and the weapon that allegedly killed Benito Mussolini. ‘The housewife from Voghera’ (casalinga di Voghera) is a phrase used in the media and political discourse as a reference to the average, stereotypical, somewhat lower-middle class Italian voter or consumer.

The Via dei Condotti stretches out from the foot of the
 Spanish Steps in the centre of Rome 

Travel tip:

The Via Condotti – actually Via dei Condotti – is a Rome street that takes its name from the conduits that carried water to the Roman Baths of Agrippa. Beginning at the foot of the Spanish Steps, it links the Tiber with the Pincio hill. Today, it is the street which contains the greatest number of Rome-based Italian fashion retailers, equivalent to Milan's Via Montenapoleone, Paris's Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, Florence's Via de' Tornabuoni or London's Bond Street.

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Attilio Pavesi - Olympic cycling champion

Rider from Emilia-Romagna won Italy's first road racing gold 

Pavesi was soon regarded as a star in Italy,
 where posters of him were everywhere

Attilio Pavesi, the first winner of an individual Olympic gold medal in Italian cycling history, was born on this day in 1910 in the small town of Caorso in Emilia-Romagna.

At the Los Angeles Olympics of 1932, Pavesi won the individual road race and picked up a second gold medal as a member of the Italian quartet that won the team classification in the same race.

Italy had already won gold medals for the team pursuit in track cycling - indeed, they won that title for the fourth time in a row in 1932 - but had not enjoyed success on the road before Pavesi's triumph.

Pavesi, the last of 11 children born to Angelo, a poultry farmer, and his wife Maria, was a natural all-round sportsman, excelling at running, long jump, swimming, diving, gymnastics and football as he grew up.

He was such a strong swimmer he once saved a boy from drowning in a local river by pulling him to the bank by his hair.

His interest in cycling developed after he left school at the age of 10 to take a job in a workshop, learning how to repair all modes of transport from bicycles to tractors.  He joined a cycling team and won a number of trophies and continued to compete during his national service.

Pavesi was selected to travel to Los Angeles as a reserve for the road race but was determined that he would not make the arduous journey just to be a spectator.  The transatlantic crossing typically took about two weeks and when he boarded the SS Conte Biancamano in Naples he had a plan to keep himself in good physical shape by exercising each day.  Luckily, while others on the voyage suffered from seasickness, he was unaffected.

The SS Conte Biancamano pictured at the port of Naples

After disembarking in New York, the Italian athletes then had to make a five-day journey by train to cross from the east coast to the west.  When their individual fitness was assessed, Pavesi was in the best shape and was picked as one of the four-man team.

He won the race, staged as a 100km time trial with the finishing line on Santa Monica Beach, with a time of two hours, 28 minutes and five seconds.  With team-mate Guglielmo Segato second and Giuseppe Olmo fourth, Italy comfortably won the team gold.

Pavesi afterwards attributed his physical strength to his mother's home-made bread.

After the Games, Pavesi turned professional, competing in cycle races at home and abroad.  At the time when the future of Italy and Europe was becoming increasingly uncertain with the outbreak of the Second World War began, he decided to emigrate to Argentina.

The circumstances are not clear, but it appears he had been competing in an event in Buenos Aires when the boat on which he intended to return to Italy departed without him. He eventually settled in the town of Sáenz Peña on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, where he opened a bicycle shop and organised professional races.

Pavesi's victory paved the way for a golden period for Italian cycling, with the next six Olympics after the War bringing 16 gold medals.

He visited Italy regularly but Argentina became his home and he had such good health that he survived beyond his 100th birthday.  He was the oldest surviving Olympian when he passed away in August 2011, just two months shy of his 101st birthday.  He spent his final days in a nursing home, looked after by his son Claudio and daughter Patricia.

Pavesi's last visit to Italy was in 2003 at the age of 93, as the principal guest at the opening of the Fiorenzuola Velodrome, not far from Caorso.  The complex contains an Attilio Pavesi Museum, commemorating his career.

The historic Rocca Mandelli in Caorso houses the town hall

Travel tip:

The town of Caorso is notable for the Rocca Mandelli, a fortress built in 820 by the sisters of the Bishop of Piacenza, Imelde and Ursa.  It is thought that the fort was first known as Ca' Ursa - the house of Ursa - from which evolved the name Caorso. The Mandelli family took control of the fort in the late 14th century and it remained in their ownership for more than 400 years.  Nowadays it houses the town hall and municipal offices.

Travel tip:

Piacenza, which stands at the confluence of the Po and Trebbia rivers, was declared "First born of the Unification of Italy" after what happened in 1848 when a massive 98 per cent of the population voted to become part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, having previously been occupied by Austria and Croatia.  It remained strategically important and suffered severe damage at the hands of Allied bombers in the Second World War.  Surviving buildings include the 13th century town hall - Il Gotico - on Piazza Cavelli and the 12th century Romanesque Cathedral.

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Pier Angeli - Hollywood star

Actress hailed for talent and beauty died tragically young

Anna Maria Pierangeli, the actress who
 became known as Pier Angeli

The actress Pier Angeli, a Hollywood star in the 1950s and 60s, was born on this day in 1932 in Cagliari, Sardinia.

She won awards in Italy and in America at the start of her career, when she was likened by some critics to the Swedish-born star Greta Garbo.

Described by the actor Paul Newman as "the most beautiful Italian actress of the century", Angeli was also a fixture in the gossip columns.  Linked romantically with a number of Hollywood's leading male actors, she dated Kirk Douglas and became close to the celebrated 'rebel' James Dean before marrying another star, the Italian-American actor and singer, Vic Damone.

It would be the first of two marriages.  She had a son, Perry, with Damone but they divorced after four years.  A second marriage, to the Italian composer, Armando Trovaioli, produced another son, Andrew, but they also divorced.

Born Anna Maria Pierangeli, the daughter of an architect, she had a twin sister, Maria Luisa, who would also become an actress.  Her mother, Enrica, used to dress the girls to resemble the American child star, Shirley Temple. The family moved to Rome when she was three.

Her mother wasted little time in enrolling the girls for stage school as soon as they were old enough and Anna Maria was only 16 when she enjoyed the big break that would shape her career.  Hanging out on the fashionable Via Veneto, she was spotted by the Italian actor, Vittorio de Sica, and recommended for a role in his upcoming film, Domani e Troppo Tardi (Tomorrow is Too Late).

Playing the part of Marisa in a tale of two star-crossed adolescent lovers, she won the Best Actress award from the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists.  Soon, Hollywood beckoned.

Again, she was a hit from the start, winning a Golden Globe for Most Promising Female Newcomer for her MGM debut movie Teresa, in which she played the title role and which saw Rod Steiger and John Ericson also make their debuts.  Renamed Pier Angeli by the MGM producer Arthur Loew, it was her performance in this film - much of it shot on location in Rome - that brought comparisons with Greta Garbo.

James Dean, the American actor with whom
Pier Angeli had a relationship

As offers of parts began to flow, so the gossip columnists began to follow Pier Angeli's every move. She was linked with numerous actors, including Marlon Brando, before settling into a year-long relationship with Kirk Douglas after they met while filming The Story of Three Loves.

Douglas was more than 15 years older than Angeli, however, and though they become engaged they eventually broke up, despite a number of attempted reconciliations.

Angeli met James Dean while making The Silver Chalice, in which Paul Newman made his screen debut.  Newman was visited on set by Dean, another young American who was simultaneously filming his debut movie, East of Eden.  The pretty young Italian actress caught his eye and they hit it off immediately.

By now, Angeli's family had moved to California and though she and Dean became inseparable, her mother disapproved of the relationship, preferring the charming Damone, whom Angeli has dated before and had the advantage - in her mother's eyes - of being a Catholic from a New York Italian family.

It is said that Angeli would have married Dean had he proposed, but he was reluctant to commit. He was still inclined to act on impulses. When he announced, suddenly, that he was going to New York and did not return for two weeks, her mother persuaded Pier that he was unreliable and she terminated their relationship.  Soon afterwards, she accepted a proposal from Damone.

In the best melodramatic tradition of screen romances, Dean is said to have sat outside on his motorcycle while the wedding was taking place in a church in Beverley Hills, speeding away noisily as the couple emerged.  Later, after the failure of her second marriage, Angeli confessed that Dean, who would be killed in a road accident a year later, had been the true love of her life.

With painful irony, Angeli would win plaudits in 1956 for Somebody Up There Likes Me, playing the wife of Paul Newman, who took the role of the prize fighter Rocky Graziano that had originally been earmarked for Dean.

Her career at the top was not over.  In 1960 she was nominated for a BAFTA as best foreign actress for her performance alongside Richard Attenborough in the British film The Angry Silence and starred with Stewart Granger in the Biblical epic Sodom and Gomorrah.

Pier Angeli died in 1971 in tragic circumstances at the age of just 39, in an apartment belonging to her former acting coach in Beverley Hills. She had been receiving treatment for a stomach disorder but her death was from an overdose of barbiturates.

Travel tip:

Sardinia's fascinating capital, Cagliari, combines fragments of the past – spanning Carthaginian, Roman, Byzantine, Spanish and Italian eras – with 21st-century cosmopolitanism.  Visitors should concentrate first on the Castello district, the medieval heart of the city built on top of a hill with a view of the Gulf of Cagliari. Built from local white limestone, most of the city walls remain intact and include two towers that survive from the early 14th century.

The Westin Excelsior Hotel on Rome's Via Veneto

Travel tip: 

Rome's Via Vittorio Veneto, commonly known as the Via Veneto, is one of the capital's most famous, elegant and expensive streets. The street is named after the 1918 Battle of Vittorio Veneto, a decisive Italian victory of World War I, and immortalised by Federico Fellini's 1960 film La Dolce Vita, which celebrated its heyday in the '50s and '60s when its bars and restaurants attracted Hollywood stars and jet set personalities.  Some of Rome's most renowned cafés and five star hotels, such as Café de Paris, Harry's Bar, the Regina Hotel Baglioni and the Westin Excelsior are located in Via Veneto.

More reading:

Roberto Rossellini - pioneer of neo-realism

Federico Fellini - great 20th century filmmaker

Rudolph Valentino - tragic star of silent movies


(Photo of Via Veneto by Gobbler CC BY-SA 3.0)

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Umberto Eco – novelist and semiotician

Prolific author became fascinated with signs and symbols

Academic and writer Umberto Eco was born on this day in 1932 in Alessandria in Piedmont.

Umberto Eco

He is best known for his mystery novel, The Name of the Rose - Il Nome della Rosa, which was first published in Italian in 1980, but he is also a respected expert on semiotics, the branch of linguistics concerned with signs and symbols.

Eco studied medieval literature and philosophy at the University of Turin and after graduating worked in television as well returning to lecture at the University of Turin.

He has since been a visiting professor at a number of American universities and has received honorary doctorates from universities in America and Serbia.

As well as producing fiction, he has published books on medieval aesthetics, literary criticism, media culture, anthropology and philosophy. He has also helped to found an important new approach in contemporary semiotics and to launch a journal on semiotics.

Eco set his first novel, The Name of the Rose, in a 14th century monastery with a Franciscan friar as the detective. The book has been described as ‘an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory’. In 1986 it was made into a film starring Sean Connery.

Buy The Name Of The Rose, Foucault's Pendulum and Numero Zero.

His novel Foucault’s Pendulum, published in 1988, is about three book editors who decide to have a bit of fun with what they think is a fictional plot to take over the world by a secret order descended from the Knights Templar. But when the story takes over and the deaths start mounting up they are forced to make a frantic search for the truth.

Eco’s most recent novel, Numero Zero, has now been translated from the original Italian by Richard Dixon. First published in English in November 2015, it has been described as being about ‘Mussolini, media hoaxes, gossip and murder’.

Now 84, Eco divides his time between living in his apartment in Milan and his holiday home near Urbino.

UPDATE - Umberto Eco died in Milan in February 2016.

Travel tip:

Alessandria is an historic city about 90 km south east of Turin in Piedmont. It is easy to reach as it is on the Turin–Genoa railway line and is a hub for six other railway lines. It has 14th and 15th century churches in the centre to look round as well as a museum devoted to the Battle of Marengo, which was fought near the town in 1800 between Austrian and French forces.

A view over the walled city of Urbino
Photo: Zyance (CC BY-SA 2.5)

Travel tip:

Urbino is a walled city in the Marche region with a remarkable legacy of Renaissance architecture. One of the highlights is the Palazzo Ducale, built in the 15th century for Federico II da Montefeltro and now home to one of the most important collections of Renaissance paintings in the world.

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