Terror attack on Café de Paris

Grenades thrown into iconic meeting place

A bloodstained pavement and upturned
tables and chairs after the attack

The Café de Paris, a hang-out for Rome’s rich and famous during the 1950s and ‘60s and a symbol of the era encapsulated in Fellini’s classic film La dolce vita, was attacked by terrorists on this day in 1985.

Tables outside the iconic venue, on the city’s fashionable Via Veneto, were packed with tourists on a busy evening when two grenades were thrown from a passing car or motorcycle.

One of the devices, of the classic type known as pineapple grenades, failed to explode, but the other did go off, injuring up to 39 people.

Although 20 were taken to hospital, thankfully most were released quickly after treatment for minor wounds. There were no fatalities and only one of those hospitalised, a chef who happened to be waiting on tables at the time of the attack, suffered serious injuries, from which he recovered.

Most of the victims were reported to be American, Argentine, West German or British tourists enjoying a late evening drink while taking in the atmosphere of Roman nightlife on a street lined with shops, cafés, airline offices and luxury hotels.

It was thought that three individuals carried out the attack but only one was apprehended and charged. While two of the attackers drove away at speed, Ahmad Hassan Abu Alì Sereya fled the scene on foot and was arrested by a policeman near Piazza Fiume, just under a kilometre away. 

A 27-year-old born in Lebanon, Sereya claimed to be in Rome to buy clothes to resell on a market stall in Beirut.

The tree-lined Via Veneto was a symbol of wealth
and luxury the mid-20th century Rome

He said he was in Via Veneto at the time of the attack purely by chance. But Italian secret service agents found in his possession a telephone number registered to an office of the Palestinian Abu Nidal militant group, which was enough evidence for a court to find him guilty and hand down a 17-year prison sentence.

The motive for the attack was never fully established but it is thought the Café de Paris was chosen because of its proximity to the American Embassy in Rome. The date of the attack coincided with the third anniversary of the massacre of up to 3,000 Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites by Israeli-backed military and militia groups on the outskirts of Beirut in 1982.

The Café de Paris incident was one in a long sequence of Arab-linked terror attacks or planned attacks in Rome during the 1970s and ‘80s, the deadliest of which both occurred at the city’s Fiumicino airport.

In 1973, an attack carried out by five terrorists claimed 34 lives, including 29 passengers on a Pan American Airways plane that was stormed as it was waiting to take off.

In December 1985, just nine weeks after the Café de Paris incident, four attackers threw grenades and opened fire at the check-in desks of Israel's El Al Airline and the United States carrier Trans World Airlines, killing 12 travellers and an Israeli security officer.

Fellini's classic movie La dolce vita was
filmed in the area around Via Veneto

Travel tip:

Via Veneto, once one of Rome’s most elegant and expensive thoroughfares, is actually called Via Vittorio Veneto, named after the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, a decisive Italian victory of World War I, although the full name is rarely used.  Among many exclusive shops, luxury hotels and bars, the Café de Paris was probably the most famous venue. The place to see and be seen in the 1950s and ‘60s, it was a magnet for visitors hoping to catch a glimpse of the film stars, models and other jet-setters who often occupied its tables. The bar was immortalised in Federico Fellini’s movie La dolce vita, starring Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée and Marcello Mastroianni, with many shots filmed there. 

The shutters across the entrances to the Cafè
de Paris remain permanently closed

Travel tip

Anyone wanting to pay a nostalgic visit to the Café de Paris today will be disappointed. Although the beautiful wood and coloured glass of its frontage are still in place, and the Liberty framed glass display cases still contain black and white photographs of its famous ‘60s clientele, the doors are permanently shuttered up. The business went into decline in the later years of the 20th century and fell into the hands of mafia groups in the early part of this century, after which it was closed as part of a crackdown on money laundering. Located at No. 90 Via Veneto, close to the United States Embassy, it was revived by an anti-mafia co-operative, who served wine and food produced on land confiscated from crime gangs in southern Italy, but closed permanently in 2014 after the interior was destroyed in an arson attack. 

Also on this day:

1797: The birth of British Museum librarian Sir Anthony Panizzi

1841: The birth of politician Alessandro Fortis

1866: The Sette e Mezzo Revolt in Palermo

2005: Camorra boss Paolo Di Lauro arrested

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Carlo Savina - film composer and musical director

Worked on major scores including The Godfather and Fellini’s Amarcord

Carlo Savina conducting in during his 
time working in TV and radio in the 1950s

Musical director Carlo Savina, who arranged soundtracks written by such luminaries of the film music industry as Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota, was born on this day in 1919 in Turin.

Savina was also a prolific film composer in his own right and is credited with writing or arranging the scores of at least 200 movies in a career spanning more than 35 years.

He won a David di Donatello award for Best Music for the 1985 crime drama The Pizza Connection, directed by Damiano Damiani and starring Michele Placido, a version of which was released in the United States as The Sicilian Connection.

Yet Savina is more frequently remembered for his work with Rota on the multi-award winning soundtrack of the first film in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather trilogy in 1972 and with Federico Fellini the following year on Amarcord, the maestro’s semi-autobiographical film about growing up in a village in the Fascist Italy of the 1930s.  He worked with Fellini and Rota on many projects, including La Dolce Vita (1960), which remains their most famous collaboration.

Although the music in a film would always be attributed to the headline composer in the credits, the work done by the likes of Savina in matching their music to the scenes and in producing an edited version of the soundtrack for commercial release was invaluable.

Savina came from a musical family. His father was the first clarinet for the orchestra of the public radio broadcaster EIAR, based in their home city.

Savina, who played a wide range of instruments,
is shown accompanying a vocal group on guitar

As a child, Savina learned to play the violin and as a student attended the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Turin, where he studied piano, violin, composition, and conducting. He obtained further qualifications from the National Education Ministry in the 1940s.

Savina explored many avenues in music, for a while conducting small orchestras or playing soloists at dance halls in Turin. 

His early classical compositions included sonatas for clarinet and violin and a quartet for wind instruments. Savina also wrote a small number of operas, one of which was performed at the Teatro dei Rozzi in Siena.

Immediately after the Second World War, he wrote music and songs for the popular market.  In the 1950s, he began to acquire national fame through his work with the national broadcaster Rai, who entrusted him with the direction of a large string orchestra. He had a prominent role in the musical direction on the experimental programmes made for Rai’s early television output in 1953.

Savina was in his 30s before the film industry began to be his focus.  His relationship with some of the world’s most famous film music composers  began at the outset, when he composed the music to Carlo Borghesio’s 1950 comedy Il monello della strada (The Street Brat) in partnership with Rota.

Savina worked with Nino Rota
on The Godfather and other titles

He worked with the great commedia all’italiana director Mario Monicelli on Totò cerca pace (Totò seeks peace) in 1954 and thereafter until the late 1960s was writing as many as a dozen soundtracks per year. His individual output, from spaghetti westerns, of which he scored more than 30, to horror films, began to lessen in the 1970s, but by then he was in demand to work with other composers.

As well as Morricone and Rota, he collaborated with Armando Trovajoli, Mario Nascimbene, Stanley Myers, Stephen Sondheim, Philippe Sarde, and Miklós Rózsa among the great big-screen music composers of his time.  

It was his relationship with Rota and Fellini that would prove the most enduring and successful, spanning almost 30 years until Rota’s death in 1979. Their last collaboration was on Fellini’s Orchestra Rehearsal, a 1978 film in which members of an orchestra go on strike against their conductor.

Savina, who wrote under various pseudonyms in his career, including Herbert Buckman, Charles Hanger and James Munshin, died in Rome in 2002 at the age of 82.

After his death, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Rome’s historic film school, established the Premio Carlo Savina as an annual prize for composers of film music. Winners include Morricone, Davide Cavuti and Franco Piersanti, who among other things wrote the music for the TV series based on Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano novels.

Elegant streets and a vibrant café
culture are a feature of Turin

Travel tip:

Turin, the capital city of the region of Piedmont, where Carlo Savina was born and grew up, has some fine architecture that illustrates its rich history as the home of the Savoy Kings of Italy. Piazza Castello, with the royal palace, royal library and Palazzo Madama, which used to house the Italian senate, is at the heart of ‘royal’ Turin.  An elegant, stylish and sophisticated city, Turin has much to commend it, from its many historic cafés to 12 miles of arcaded streets and some of the finest restaurants in Piedmont. In the 19th century, the city’s cafés were popular with writers, artists, philosophers, musicians and politicians among others, who would meet to discuss the affairs of the day.  The city’s duomo, the Cattedrale di San Giovanni Battista, as it is also known, was built between 1491 and 1498 in Piazza San Giovanni in Turin, on the site of an old Roman theatre.

The Centro Sperimentale di Cinematogrofia
in Rome was established in the 1930s

Travel tip:

The Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia has its headquarters in Via Tuscolana in Rome, was established at the time when the city became the hub of the Italian film industry because of the nearby Cinecittà, a large studio complex to the south of the city, built during the Fascist era under the personal direction of Benito Mussolini and his son, Vittorio. The studios were bombed by the Allies in the Second World War but were rebuilt and used again in the 1950s for large productions, such as Ben-Hur, the 1959 epic starring Charlton Heston, the acclaimed soundtrack of which saw Carlo Savina work with the Hungarian-American composer Miklós Rózsa. These days a range of productions, from television drama to music videos, are filmed there and Cinecittà has its own dedicated Metro stop.

Also on this day:

1854: The birth of author Francis Marion Crawford

1945: The death of composer Pietro Mascagni

1980: The bombing of Bologna railway station

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Paolo Sorrentino - film director

Seventh Italian director to win Best Foreign Film at Oscars

Paolo Sorrentino won an Oscar for
La grande bellezza in 2014

The film director Paolo Sorrentino, whose 2013 movie La grande bellezza won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, was born on this day in 1970 in Naples.

The award put him in the company of Federico Fellini and Vittorio De Sica in landing the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, a prize that has been won by only seven Italian directors in the history of the Academy Awards.

Fellini scooped the honour four times and De Sica twice. The other successful Italian directors are Elio Petri, Giuseppe Tornatore, Gabriele Salvatores and Roberto Benigni.

La grande bellezza - released for English-speaking audiences as The Great Beauty - was the first Italian winner since Benigni’s Life is Beautiful was named as Best Foreign Film in 1998.

Sorrentino’s 2021 semi-autobiographical movie The Hand of God - È stata la mano di Dio in Italian - was nominated for an Oscar but missed out to the Japanese drama Drive My Car.

Lauded for combining an expansive visual style with a sensitivity for psychological subtleties in his films, Sorrentino was born in the Arenella district of Naples, a relatively prosperous neighbourhood atop the Vomero hill. 

His adolescence was overshadowed by a personal tragedy when he was 16, when both his parents died after a carbon monoxide leak at the ski lodge they owned in central Italy

Actor Toni Servillo in his role as
Jep Gambardella in La grande bellezza 

Their son may well have died with them but on the fateful April day in 1987 Sorrentino was still in Naples, having stayed behind to watch his idol, Diego Maradona, play for SSC Napoli at the Stadio San Paolo, where he was a season ticket holder.

Understandably, Sorrentino took a long time to come to terms with being orphaned. Eventually, he obtained a place studying economics and business at university in Naples, after which he chose a career in the film industry, making his debut as a screenwriter on Antonio Capuano’s 1998 comedy, The Dust of Naples.

His first full-length feature L'uomo in più - One Man Up - brought him immediate recognition as an emerging talent. The film was selected at the 2001 Venice Film Festival, gaining three nominations for the David di Donatello from the Academy of Italian Cinema and winning the Nastro d'Argento, awarded by Italian cinema journalists, Best First Time Director.

More awards followed for Le conseguenze dell'amore (2004), L'amico di famiglia (2006) and Il Divo (2008), his dramatised biopic of the controversial veteran politician, Giulio Andreotti. 

Sorrentino’s talents also extend to writing: his 2010 novel Hanno tutti ragione - Everybody’s Right - was shortlisted for the Premio Strega, Italy’s most prestigious literary prize.

It was La grande bellezza  that saw him join such illustrious names as Fellini and De Sica in the roll call of great Italian directors.

Sorrentino (second right) and the cast of La grande
bellezza with president Giorgio Napolitano (right) 

Set in Rome, La grande bellezza has been compared to Fellini’s masterpiece La dolce vita in that its central character is a journalist, Jep Gambardella, who has spent his life immersed in the superficiality of Roman society nightlife, a debonair figure whose one novel brought him a literary acclaim that was enough to sustain his fame for decades.

On his 65th birthday, he learns that the woman who was his first sweetheart has died, having confessed to her husband that Gambardella had been the only man she truly loved.  The shock causes him to take stock of his life, becoming melancholy about what he might have been had he done more than merely charm his way through an easy life of nightclubs, parties, and cafés. Ultimately, he finds a new appreciation for the timeless beauty of Rome and rediscovers himself.

In addition to the Oscar, La grande bellezza won 18 other awards around the world, including a BAFTA and a Golden Globe.

Although it missed out on the Oscar, The Hand of God, which takes its title from the famous description Maradona made of the contentious goal he scored with his fist against England in the 1986 World Cup, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.

The film contains many parallels with Sorrentino’s own life in that its central character is an adolescent whose life is rocked by personal tragedy, against the background of Naples in the 1980s, when the arrival of Maradona to play for SSC Napoli not only transformed the fortunes of the club but the city itself.

A mist-shrouded Vesuvius seen
from the top of Vomero hill

Travel tip:

The Arenella district of Naples, where Sorrentino was born, borders Vomero, a largely residential area of central Naples with a number of buildings of historic significance. The most dominant, on top of Vomero Hill, is the large medieval fortress, Castel Sant'Elmo.  In front of the fortress is the Certosa San Martino, the former Carthusian monastery, now a museum.  The adjoining street, Largo San Martino, offers extraordinary views over the city towards Vesuvius.  Vomero's other tourist attraction is the Villa Floridiana, once the home of Ferdinand I, the Bourbon King of the Two Sicilies.  Surrounded by extensive gardens, the building now houses the Duke of Martina National Museum of Ceramics. 

Inside the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona in 
Naples, which can house 60,000 spectators

Travel tip:

The Stadio San Paolo - now renamed the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona - is Italy’s third largest football ground with a capacity of just over 60,000. Built in the Fuorigrotta neighbourhood on the north side of the city, it was completed in 1959, more than 10 years after work began and has since been renovated twice. The home of SSC Napoli, it was Maradona’s home stadium between 1984 and 1991, during which time the club won the Italian championship twice, having never before won the title in its history. The stadium hosted the 1990 World Cup semi-final, in which Maradona’s Argentina ended Italy’s hopes of reaching the final. 

Also on this day:

1594: The death of painter Tintoretto

1914: The death of Angelo Moriondo, inventor of the espresso coffee machine

1921: The birth of Andrew Grima, jeweller to the British Royal Family

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La dolce vita - cinematic masterpiece

Commentary on decadence of 1950s Rome saw Fellini hailed as a genius

Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg in the
most famous scene from Fellini's classic

La dolce vita, a film still regarded as one of the greatest in cinema history, was screened in front of a paying audience for the first time on this day in 1960.

After a preview before invited guests and media at the Fiamma cinema in Rome, the Capitol Cinema in Milan was chosen for its public premiere. The movie went on general release in Italy the day afterwards and made its London debut on 8 February.  It was shown in America for the first time in April of the following year.

Directed by Federico Fellini, the film won the Palme d'Or, the highest award presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960 and was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Director for Fellini, although ultimately the production team had to be content with the Oscar for Best Costumes.

It won numerous awards in Italy, while the brilliant Nino Rota’s soundtrack was nominated for a Grammy.  In America, the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle made it their best foreign film of 1961.

Federico Fellini is remembered by many as
the greatest of all Italian film-makers

The film is episodic rather than having a conventional plot, following the life of Marcello Rubini, a somewhat jaded magazine gossip columnist portrayed by Marcello Mastroianni, over seven days and nights in the Rome of the late 1950s.

It is a decade in which the city, desperate to forget the shame of Fascism and the devastation inflicted on the country by World War Two, revels in everything modern and exciting about what feels like a reborn Italy.  The stars created by the country’s renascent movie industry, now joined by an influx of Americans and others, are the new gods and goddesses. Rubini, accompanied by his photographer friend Paparazzo, follows their every move.

Immersing himself in the glitzy nightlife around the capitol’s fashionable Via Veneto, the handsome, sharply-dressed Rubini himself indulges in the hedonistic pleasures on offer with only occasional restraint, much to the annoyance of his girlfriend, Emma.

But in Fellini’s story he is struggling with an inner conflict, at once chastising himself for the shallowness of his profession and his failure to make the most of his writing talent, but unable to resist the temptations of alcohol, easy sex and opportunities to behave outrageously that seem to present themselves each day.

Mastroianni became one
of Italy's biggest stars

Fellini conveys this, and delivers a critique on the state of an Italian society he is willing to see as in moral decline, through what is essentially a series of parables, in which the characters are sharply drawn and the scenes resonantly symbolic.

The episode in which Anita Ekberg, cast as a visiting Swedish starlet, lures Mastroianni to follow her, fully clothed, into the Trevi Fountain, is the one for which the film is most remembered, while the name of Paparazzo has entered the language to describe any photographer who pursues the rich and famous.

Yet it has a complexity that continues to intrigue, its near three-hour duration demanding that viewers return again and again to appreciate it in all its subtlety. Fellini’s fellow director Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote that "La dolce vita is too important to be discussed as one would normally discuss a film.”

More than 13.5 million Italians paid to watch the film, attracted not least by its controversial nature.  Its opening sequence, in which a gathering of bikini-clad girls interrupt their sunbathing to wave as a helicopter towing a statue of Jesus passes overhead, was condemned by the Catholic church as a parody of a second coming of Christ. In countries including Spain and Portugal it was banned for several years.

Fellini once said that the original germ of the idea for La dolce vita came from the fashion in the 50s for the so-called sack dress, a waistless garment that was tapered at the hemline but billowed out in the middle, which he imagined to represent a way in which a physically beautiful woman might conceal her moral shortcomings from view.

Others have speculated that he might have been influenced by the Montesi scandal that had reached its conclusion only two years before he began shooting.  The film ends when Rubini and others are partying on a beach at dawn when fishermen haul ashore a huge, ray-like fish that had become caught in their net and died.  The Montesi scandal, which linked Rome society figures to drug-fuelled orgies at a luxurious beachside villa, began when the body of Wilma Montesi, a 21-year-old woman who had gone missing in Rome the day before, was discovered lying face down at the water’s edge on a beach near the capital.

Nicola Salvi's Trevi Fountain, with the statue of
Oceanus by Pietro Bracci in the centre

Travel tip:

The Trevi Fountain, which was symbolically turned off and draped in black after Marcello Mastroianni died, was officially opened by Pope Clement XIII in 1762. Standing at more than 26m (85 feet) high and 49m (161 feet) wide, it is the largest Baroque fountain in Rome and probably the most famous fountain in the world. It was designed by a Roman architect, Nicola Salvi, but he died when it was only half finished. Made from Travertine stone quarried in Tivoli near Rome, the fountain was completed by Giuseppe Pannini, with Oceanus (god of all water), designed by Pietro Bracci, set in the central niche. Coins are traditionally thrown into the fountain by visitors, using the right hand over the left shoulder. It was once estimated about 3000 euros were thrown into the fountain each day, money that helped feed the city’s poorest citizens.

A picture postcard from Milan showing the
Capitol Cinema building 

Travel tip:

Milan’s former Capitol Cinema was located on the corner of Via Croce Rossa and Via dei Giardini, not far from Via Manzoni and Via Monte Napoleone.  Designed in the late 1930s, it was part of an imposing building that combined shops, offices and apartments. With seats for 1,350 people, it screened its first film in September 1949 and hosted many premieres, often attended by the directors and stars. The debut of La dolce vita attracted such a large crowd that windows were reportedly broken in the crush.  The film was so successful it continued to be shown at the Capitol for several months. Other famous Italian films to make their public debut there included Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli) and Vittorio De Sica’s La ciociara, released outside Italy as Two Women, which featured an Oscar-winning performance by Sophia Loren.  Sadly, the Capitol’s popularity declined in the 1980s and it was closed permanently in 1984. Today the building houses a large clothes shop. 

Also on this day:

1578: The death of portrait painter Giovanni Battista Moroni

1932: The birth of football coach Cesare Maldini

1964: The birth of football coach Carolina Morace

The Festival of Saint Agatha of Sicily

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Valentina Cortese – actress

Vibrant performer made more than 100 films

Valentina Cortese in Michelangelo Antonioni's 1955 film
Le Amiche (The Girlfriends)

Film star Valentina Cortese was born on this day in 1923 in Milan.

She had an acting career lasting nearly 60 years and won an Academy Award nomination for her performance as an ageing, alcoholic movie star in Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night in 1973.

Cortese was born to a single mother, who sent her to live with her maternal grandparents in Turin when she was six years old.

She enrolled in the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome at the age of 15 and made her screen debut in 1940. This paved the way for her first internationally acclaimed film in 1948, an Italian adaptation of Les Miserables with Gino Cervi and Marcello Mastroianni, in which she played the roles of both Fantine and Cosette.

She then appeared in the British film The Glass Mountain in 1949 and also appeared in many American films of the period, while continuing to work in Europe with directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini and Francois Truffaut.

After signing a contract with 20th Century Fox, Cortese starred in Malaya with Spencer Tracey and James Stewart and The House on Telegraph Hill with Richard Basehart and William Lundigan.

With the American actor James Stewart on the set of
Richard Thorpe's 1949 war drama Malaya

Cortese married her co-star, Richard Basehart, in 1951 and had one son with him, who became the actor Jackie Basehart.

The couple divorced in 1960 and Cortese never remarried.  Jackie died in Milan in 2015, four years before her own death.

She also enjoyed success on the stage, appearing in plays by Chekhov, Shakespeare, Brecht and Pirandello, frequently starring at Milan’s Piccolo Teatro.

Her final American film was When Time Ran Out in 1980, but she continued to make films in Italy until the 1990s. Having appeared in more than 100 films and TV shows, her final appearance was when she played the role of a Mother Superior in Franco Zeffirelli’s film, Sparrow, in 1993.

Valentina Cortese died in 2019 in Milan at the age of 96.

Milan's famous Gothic cathedral at the heart of
Lombardy's principal city

Travel tip:

Milan, where Valentina Cortese was born and died, is the capital city of the northern region of Lombardy. A leading city in the fields of art, entertainment, fashion and finance, Milan has a wealth of theatres with a long tradition of staging a variety of entertainment. In north west Milan, Teatro Dal Verme in San Giovanni sul Muro opened in 1872, the Teatro dell’Arte in Viale Alemagna was redesigned in 1960 and Teatro Litta next to Palazzo Litta in Corso Magenta is believed to be the oldest theatre in the city. The famous opera house, La Scala, inaugurated in 1778, has a fascinating museum that displays costumes and memorabilia from the history of the theatre. The entrance is in Largo Ghiringhelli, just off Piazza Scala. It is open every day except the Italian Bank Holidays and a few days in December. Opening hours are from 9.00 to 12.30 and 1.30 to 5.30 pm.

The Piccolo Teatro Grassi in Milan,
founded in 1947

Travel tip:

The Piccolo Teatro in Milan, where Valentina Cortese regularly appeared, was founded in 1947 in Via Rivoli in north west Milan by theatre impresario Paolo Grassi and director Giorgio Strehler. The first public theatre in Italy, it aimed to be an arts theatre for everyone and continues to stage quality productions for the broadest possible audience to this day.

Also on this day:

1803: The birth of book thief Guglielmo Libri 

1926: The birth of singer Claudio Villa

1958: The birth of shoe designer Cesare Paciotti

Capodanno in Italy


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Pier Paolo Pasolini - writer and film director

Controversial figure who met violent death

Pier Paolo Pasolini courted controversy in his films,
his private life and his politics

The novelist, writer and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini was born on this day in 1922 in Bologna.

Pasolini's best-known work included his portrayal of Jesus Christ in The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), his bawdy adaptations of such literary classics as Boccaccio’s Decameron (1971) and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1972), and and his brutal satire on Fascism entitled Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). 

He also wrote novels and poetry, made documentaries, directed for the theatre and was an outspoken columnist for the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera, expressing political views that would regularly spark heated debate.

A former member of the Communist Party and openly homosexual, Pasolini died in violent circumstances in Ostia, near Rome, in November 1975, supposedly murdered by a young man he had picked up at the city’s Termini railway station, although there was some mystery around the incident and speculation over motives continues to this day.

The son of an army lieutenant, Pasolini lived in various northern Italian towns in his childhood, determined by his father’s postings. Family life was somewhat turbulent. His father spent time in prison over gambling debts but was also the man who detained Anteo Zamboni, a teenager suspected of attempting to assassinate Mussolini in 1926.

The house where Pasolini was born in Bologna - now an
office of the Guardia di Finanzia, is marked with a plaque

Pasolini graduated from the University of Bologna and began to pursue an interest in writing poetry that he had nurtured since the age of seven, inspired by the beauty of Casarsa della Delizia, a town in Friuli and the home of his mother’s family. He published his first volume of poetry in 1942.

He attributed his mostly Marxist politics to his experience of the oppressed peasant communities around Casarsa. His 19-year-old brother Guido, a member of the anti-Fascist Partito d’Azione, was accidentally killed in by partisans in an ambush.

After 1945, Pasolini worked as a secondary school teacher in nearby Valvasone but his activities as a Communist Party member made him a controversial figure and he was eventually forced out of his job by the local Christian Democrats, whom he accused of manufacturing a scandal that saw him charged with the "corruption of minors and (committing) obscene acts in public places".

In January 1950, Pasolini moved to Rome with his mother Susanna to start a new life. He was later acquitted of both charges. They moved to the run-down suburb of Rebibbia, next to a prison, which provided the inspiration for his first novels, which dealt with the violent lives of poor proletarian immigrants living in often horrendous sanitary and social conditions, and his debut movie, Accattone (1961).

Pasolini taking part in a radio broadcast
in Rome in 1975

Prior to that he had worked variously as a teacher in Ciampino and a writer for Italian state radio before making the acquaintance of the director Federico Fellini, who employed him to help with the Roman dialect in both Le notti di Cabiria and La Dolce Vita.

Pasolini was prepared to tackle controversial subjects. Mamma Roma (1962), featuring Anna Magnani, which told the story of a prostitute and her son, was considered an affront to morality and widely criticised.

The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964), which won awards at both the Venice Film Festival and BAFTA, also attracted criticism, portraying Christ as a revolutionary ‘Red Messiah’, but Pasolini vowed to direct it from the "believer's point of view" and the Catholic Church has since described it as “the best film ever made about Jesus Christ.”

He attracted criticism for different reasons with his sex-laden Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), and Il fiore delle mille e una notte (literally The Flower of 1001 Nights, released in English as Arabian Nights, 1974), his Trilogy of Life, which celebrated the human body while commenting on contemporary sexual and religious mores and hypocrisies. They were hugely popular, Decameron and The Canterbury Tales winning awards at the Berlin Film Festival, although Pasolini later regretted his association with them, because the many softcore imitations of the films made him uncomfortable about their success.

His final work, Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), exceeded what most viewers could accept at the time in its explicit scenes of intensely sadistic violence. A satire on Fascism - Salò being the name of the Fascist ‘republic’ Mussolini set up in northern Italy in a desperate attempt to cling to power - it is based on the novel 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade, and is considered Pasolini's most controversial film.

Willem Dafoe starred as Pasolini in the 2014
film about his life directed by Abel Ferrara

Despite evidence that more than one person was involved, only Giuseppe (Pino) Pelosi, the young man he supposedly picked up, was convicted of his murder. Pelosi was caught after police stopped him as he sped from the scene in Pasolini’s Alfa Romeo.

The autopsy indicated that the director had been run over by the car on the beach as Ostia, having first been severely beaten with blunt instruments. Pelosi confessed his guilt, claiming he attacked the director after refusing to be subjected to a particularly violent sexual act.

The verdict of the 1976 court hearing was that Pelosi “and unknown others” were guilty of the crime, although the “unknown others” did not appear in the wording when that verdict went to appeal.

Speculation about alternative motives began almost immediately and intensified when, 29 years later, Pelosi retracted his confession. He said he had made it under the threat of violence to his family and claimed that the crime had been committed by three people regularly seen at the Tiburtina branch of the neo-fascist party Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement).

The conspiracy theorists discussed extortion following the theft of a number of reels of film from Salò as one explanation, while others suspected a political motive.

Franca Rame, who married the playwright
Dario Fo and became a political activist

In his columns in the Corriere della Sera, long before the Tangentopoli enquiry led to the collapse of Italy’s then deeply-corrupt political establishment, Pasolini said that the leadership of the ruling Christian Democratic party should stand trial, not only for corruption and links with the Mafia, but for association with neo-fascist terrorism, such as the bombing of trains and a demonstration in Milan.

Also, at the time of his death, Pasolini was working on a novel, Petrolio, that was clearly based on the mysterious death of Enrico Mattei, the former president of the state oil company ENI, which suggested that the scandal went to the heart of power via the involvement of the illegal masonic lodge Propaganda Due.

Attacks on left-wing activists were relatively common in the 1970s. For example, Franca Rame, the actress wife of the playwright Dario Fo and a prominent member of the Italian Communist Party, was kidnapped and raped by a group of neo-Fascists in 1973.

However, though the Pasolini case was reopened in 2005, no new conclusions were reached.

In 2014 the director Abel Ferrara made a biopic about Pasolini, with Willem Dafoe in the lead role, which was selected to compete for the Golden Lion at the 71st Venice International Film Festival.

The ruins of the Roman city of Ostia Antica are better
preserved than Pompei yet are much less well known

Travel tip:

The seaside resort of Ostia, where Pasolini’s life ended so tragically, lies 30km (19 miles) to the southwest of Rome, situated just across the Tiber river from Fiumicino, home of Rome’s largest international airport. It  adjoins the remains of the ancient Roman city of Ostia Antica, a much-better preserved site than volcano-ravaged Pompei occupying around 10,000 square metres, radiating from a mile-long main street.  There are many houses and apartment blocks, plus warehouses and public buildings, and an impressive amphitheatre.. Many Romans spend their summer holidays in the modern town, swelling a population of about 85,000.

Hotels in Ostia Antica by Booking.com

The church of Santa Croce and San Rocco, where the
funeral for Pier Paolo Pasolina took place in 1975

Travel tip:

Casarsa della Delizia is a town in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, about 40km (25 miles) west of Udine and about 18km (11 miles) from Pordenone. It is today an important agricultural centre, particularly for wine production, and an important rail hub. Until the end of the Cold War saw numbers reduced, it hosted a large number of Italian military personnel. Pasolini’s funeral took place in the parish church of Santa Croce and San Rocco, before his body was buried in the municipal emetery. The church of Santa Croce and San Rocci contains a cycle of 16th century frescoes by Pomponio Amalteo or by Pordenone.

Look for hotels in and around Casarsa della Delizia with Tripadvisor

More reading:

What made Francesco Rosi one of Italy's most influential film-makers

Why the death of Enrico Mattei remains an unsolved mystery

Laura Betti, the actress and singer who became Pasolini's companion

Also on this day:

1696: The birth of painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

1827: The death of scientist Alessandro Volta

1834: The birth of 19th century opera star Marietta Piccolomini

Selected books:

Stories from the City of God: Sketches and Chronicles of Rome 1950-1966, by Pier Paolo Pasolini

A Violent Life (novel), by Pier Paolo Pasolini

(Picture credits: plaque by Renaud Camus; Ostia Antica street by Camelia.boban; church by Intoinside)

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Susanna Tamaro - bestselling author

Writer’s third published novel was international hit

Susanna Tamaro's novel is one of the biggest selling
fiction titles in Italian literary history

The writer Susanna Tamaro, whose novel Va' dove ti porta il cuore - published in English as Follow your Heart - was one of the biggest selling Italian novels of the 20th century, was born on this day in 1957 in Trieste.

Va' dove ti porta il cuore - in which the main character, an elderly woman, reflects on her life while writing a long letter to her estranged granddaughter - has sold more than 16 million copies worldwide since it was published in 1994.

Only Umberto Eco’s historical novel Il Nome della Rosa  - The Name of the Rose - has enjoyed bigger sales among books by Italian authors written in the 20th century.

Tamaro has gone on to write more than 25 novels, winning several awards, as well as contributing a column for a number of years in the weekly magazine Famiglia Cristiana and even co-writing a song that reached the final of the Sanremo Music Festival.

Born into a middle-class family in Trieste, Tamaro is a distant relative of the writer Italo Svevo on her mother’s side. Her great-grandfather was the historian Attilio Tamaro.

Margherita Buy and Virna Lisi in a scene from Cristina
Comencini's 1996 movie version of Va' dove ti porta il cuore

In 1976, after obtaining a teaching diploma, Tamaro received a scholarship to study at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, the Italian school of cinema in Rome.

She was awarded a diploma in direction after making a short animation film entitled The Origin of Day and Night, taken from an Incas myth. After returning briefly to Trieste to work as assistant director on a feature film, she settled in Rome, where she would from time to time work for the Italian state television network, Rai. 

She completed her first novel, Illmitz, in 1981 but it was rejected by every publisher she approached (it was eventually published in 2014) and it was not until 1989, when the Marsilio publishing house began a project aimed at launching a series of young unpublished writers, that she managed to make her literary debut with La testa tra le nuvole - Head in the Clouds.

The novel won two awards - the Italo Calvino Award and the Elsa Morante Award - which encouraged Tamaro to keep up her writing.

Susanna Tamaro is related through her mother
to the Trieste-born novelist Italo Svevo

Her second novel Per voce sola - For Solo Voice - published in 1991 won the PEN International prize and was praised by film director Federico Fellini and the novelist Alberto Moravia, although sales were not spectacular.

However, when Va' dove ti porta il cuore appeared in 1994, Tamaro became the toast of the Italian literary world, hailed as “a unique voice” whose story, while rooted in her native Italy, displayed “an understanding of human lives that is universal”.

The book was turned into a film in 1996, directed by Cristina Comencini and starring Virna Lisi and Margherita Buy. At the Turin Book Fair of 2011, it was named as one of the 150 most important books in the history of Italian literature. It has been translated into more than 35 languages.

Subsequently, Tamaro has written several bestsellers, including Anima Mundi, Rispondimi (Answer Me), Ascolta la mia voce (Listen to My Voice), Fuori (Outside) and her memoir, Verso Casa (Towards Home), many of which have been published in English.

In 1997 she collaborated with the songwriter Ron (artistic name of Rosalino Cellamare) to write a Sanremo entry for the singer Tiziana Tosca Donati.

Tamaro revealed recently that she suffered from Asperger
Syndrome, a form of autism, as a child

She directed her first film, Nel mio amore (In My Love) in 2005, based on one of the stories in Rispondimi.

Since 1988 Tamaro has lived with the crime novelist Roberta Mazzoni, who invited her to stay in her home in Orvieto after she suffered a bout of asthmatic bronchitis, exacerbated by the smog and pollution of Rome.  The two subsequently shared a cottage in Porano, a nearby village. Tamaro has insisted that their relationship has always been platonic, describing it as “a loving friendship.” Tamaro recently revealed that she suffered from Asperger Syndrome, a form of autism, as a child.

Tamaro’s novels have often conveyed her political views, including her opposition to abortion, surrogacy and euthanasia, but she declined an invitation to stand in the 2008 Italian elections on an anti-abortion ticket.

The Canal Grande is one of the attractions of Trieste, a
port city with a great literary tradition

Travel tip:

The coastal city of Trieste, where Tamaro was born, is the main town of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region. Officially, it became part of the Italian Republic only in 1954, having been disputed territory for thousands of years. It was granted to Italy in 1920 after the First World War, after which 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 has a strong literary tradition, having been the home of the Irish author James Joyce for more than a decade, during which he wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, most of Dubliners and the outline of Ulysses.  Joyce’s close friend, Italo Svevo, was one of several prominent writers born in the city, including the poet Umberto Saba and the essayist Claudio Magris.  The 19th century French writer Stendhal and the English novelist DH Lawrence also spent time there.

Orvieto's beautiful Duomo - the Cattedrale di Santa Maria
Assunta - is one of the finest cathedrals in Italy

Travel tip:

The small city of Orvieto in Umbria, with a population of only 20,000, has a dramatic appearance, built on the top of a cliff of volcanic tuff stone, its elevated position further emphasised by the defensive walls built by the Etruscans. Situated about 120km (75 miles) north of Rome, it boasts one of Italy’s finest cathedrals in Italy - the Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta - with a stunningly beautiful Romanesque Gothic facade inlaid with gold mosaics fronting a building constructed from alternate layers of black and white marble.  The city’s medieval streets are a cultural paradise - busy with cafés and restaurants, bookshops, artisans' workshops and antique emporia.


More reading:

Why Alberto Moravia is recognised as a major figure in 20th century literature

The broad intellectual talents of Umberto Eco

How screen siren Virna Lisi turned back on glamour roles

Also on this day:

1685: The birth of composer Lodovico Giustini

1901: Marconi receives first transatlantic radio signal

1969: The Piazza Fontana bombing


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Andrea Zanzotto - poet

Writer drew inspiration from landscapes of Veneto

Andrea Zanzotto wrote 15 volumes of poetry
during his active career, while also teaching

Andrea Zanzotto, who was regarded as one of Italy’s greatest 20th century poets, was born on this day in 1921 in Pieve di Soligo, the village near Treviso where he lived almost all of his life. 

Zanzotto, who spent 40 years as a secondary school teacher, wrote 15 books of poetry, two prose works, two volumes of critical articles and translations of French philosophers such as Michaux, Leiris and Bataille.

His first book of poetry, Dietro il paesaggio (1951), won a literary award judged by several noteworthy Italian poets. Critics reserved their greatest acclaim for his sixth volume, La beltà (1968), in which he questioned the ability of words to reflect truth.

Zanzotto, whose verse was consistently erudite and creative, was known for his innovative engagement with language and his fascination with the rugged landscapes of the Veneto, from which he drew inspiration and provided him with much symbolism.

His upbringing was difficult at times because his father, Giovanni Zanzotto, a painter who has trained at the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts, was a committed supporter of the Socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti, who was murdered by Fascist thugs in 1924 a few days after accusing Mussolini’s party of electoral fraud.

Zanzotto had a difficult upbringing in the
Fascist Italy of the 1920s and 1930s

Fearing for his own safety, Giovanni fled to France in 1925. He returned to the Veneto, taking a job as a teacher in Santo Stefano di Cadore, about 100km (62 miles) north of Pieve di Soligo, not far from the border with Austria, in 1927 and the family reunited there in 1928.

Giovanni, in fact, painted some frescoes in a church in nearby Costalissoio but his campaigning against the Fascists and the collapse of a co-operative that was providing financial support for his family, forced him into exile again in 1931.

Andrea, who had been deeply affected by the death of his younger sister, Marina, became close to his maternal grandmother and an aunt, and began to develop his love of writing. They helped him to see his first work published in 1936.

After completing school, Zanzotto began to focus on a career in teaching but suffered another loss in 1937 when his other sister, Angela, died of typhus. The grief, combined with the fatigue of commuting to college in Treviso, took a toll on his health, yet he obtained his teaching credentials.

Zanzotto enrolled at the University of Padua, where he received his diploma in literature in 1942, with a thesis on the work of the Italian Nobel Prize winner Grazia Deledda, after which he began teaching in Valdobbiadene and then Treviso.

Andrea Zanzotto spent the majority of
his 90-year life in Pieve di Solito

In the meantime, having avoided conscription because of severe asthma, he participated in the Italian Resistance, working largely on propaganda publications, and after the war spent some time travelling in Switzerland, France and Spain before returning to Pieve di Soligo where he resumed his work as a teacher.

Zanzotto’s poetry was influenced by his study of European intellectual thought and became notable for his of divergent language, from the lofty lingua aulica of the great poets of the past, notably Petrarch and Dante, to the language of pop songs and advertising slogans.

Dialect was one of Zanzotto’s favourite linguistic registers. Section one of Filò (1976) was written in a pseudo-archaic Venetian dialect. It was composed at the request of Federico Fellini for his film Casanova. Section two, in fact, included a diatribe against the film industry.

Dialectal words and phrases reoccurred in Il Galateo in bosco (1978), the first book of a trilogy completed by Fosfeni (1983) and Idioma (1986), which are regarded among his finest works.

Although a lot of his writing suggested nostalgia for disappearing landscapes, languages and cultures, Zanzotto never lost sight of the present and its possible effects on the future. His later works were increasingly engaged with topical issues such as the effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the war in Bosnia, and local environmental changes.

He died in October 2011 at the age of 90, survived by his wife, Marisa, to whom he had been married for 52 years, and their children.

The neighbourhood of Cal Santa in Pieve di Solito, where
Zanzotto lived for many years in his childhood

Travel tip:

Pieve di Soligo is a town of some 12,000 inhabitants a little more than 30km (19 miles) north of Treviso, in a plain bordered to the north by the Belluno Prealps. At the heart of the town is the cathedral dedicated to Santa Maria Assunta, a neo-Romanesque monument built in the early 20th century by the architect Domenico Rupolo, who is well known for having designed the fish market by the Rialto bridge in Venice. Along the banks of the Soligo river are two of the oldest parts of the town, including Cal Santa, where Zanzotto spent much of his formative years.

The vine-clad hills around Valdobbiadene, home of Italy's
finest Prosecco wines

Travel tip:

The picturesque hills around Valdobbiadene, where Zanzotto briefly worked as a supply teacher, are famous for the production of what is generally regarded as the best Prosecco in Italy. It is largely made from Glera grapes and though the name comes from that of the village of Prosecco near Trieste, where the grape and wine originated, the only Prosecco granted DOCG status - the classification granted to superior Italian wines - is produced from grapes grown on the hills between the towns of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, or from a smaller area around the town of Asolo, a few kilometres south of Valdobbiadene.

More reading:

How Grazia Deledda became the first Italian woman to win a Nobel Prize

The tragic brilliance of Giacomo Leopardi

What the Italian language owes to Petrarch

Also on this day:

1881: The death of missionary Saint Daniele Comboni

1891: The birth of Mafia boss Stefano Magaddino


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