29 April

NEW - Vittorio Vanzo – conductor

Versatile musician was inspired by the operas of Wagner

Vittorio Maria Vanzo, who was passionate about the music of Wagner and introduced many of his works to Italian audiences, was born on this day in 1862 in Padua.  Vanzo toured both Italy and abroad as a piano accompanist and conductor and he also composed music himself.  His mother was from a noble family in Padua and his father was a doctor in literature and mathematics. Encouraged by his mother, Vanzo studied piano technique under the pianist and composer Melchiorre Balbi. He then went to the Conservatory in Milan, where he studied counterpoint with Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti and composition with Antonio Bazzini.  After graduating in 1881, he became a piano accompanist in the school for singing headed by the baritone Felice Varesi, and he later performed in concerts throughout Italy and in other countries.  Read more…

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Liberation of Fornovo di Taro

How Brazilian soldiers hastened Nazi capitulation

The town of Fornovo di Taro in Emilia-Romagna acquired a significant place in Italian military history for a second time on this day in 1945 when it was liberated from Nazi occupation by soldiers from the Brazilian Expeditionary Force fighting with the Allies.  Under the command of General João Baptista Mascarenhas de Morais, the Brazilians marched into Fornovo, which is situated about 13km (8 miles) south-west of Parma on the east bank of the Taro river, at the conclusion of the four-day Battle of Collecchio.  It was in Fornovo that the 148th Infantry Division of the German army under the leadership of General Otto Fretter-Pico offered their surrender, along with soldiers from the 90th Panzergrenadier Division and the 1st Bersaglieri and 4th Mountain Divisions of the Fascist National Republican Army.  In total, 14,779 German and Italian troops laid down their arms. Read more…

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Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini - painter

Venetian artist who made mark in England

The painter Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, who is regarded as one of the most important Venetian painters of the early 18th century, was born on this day in 1675 in Venice.   He played a major part in the spread of the Venetian style of large-scale decorative painting in northern Europe, working in Austria, England, France, Germany, and the Netherlands.  With a style that had influences of Renaissance artist Paolo Veronese and the Baroque painters Pietro da Cortona and Luca Giordano, he is considered an important predecessor of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo in the development of Venetian art.  A pupil of the Milanese painter Paolo Pagani, Pellegrini began travelling while still a teenager, accompanying Pagano to Moravia and Vienna.  After a period studying in Rome, he returned to Venice and married Angela Carriera, the sister of the portraitist Rosalba Carriera. Read more…

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Sara Errani - tennis champion

Five-times Grand Slam doubles winner reached No 5 in singles

Tennis star Sara Errani, who was born in Bologna on this day in 1987, is one of the most successful Italian tennis players of all time.  She and former partner Roberta Vinci's career record of five Grand Slam doubles titles is unparalleled.  No other Italian combination has won more than one Grand Slam title.  Errani won her sixth Grand Slam title at the US Open in 2024, winning the mixed doubles with an Italian partner in Andrea Vavassori. In the same year, Errani and her new women's doubles partner, Jasmine Paolini, were runners-up in the French Open but returned to the Roland Garros clay courts two months later to win the women's doubles gold medal at the Paris Olympics.  Nicola Pietrangeli, who was ranked the No 3 men's singles player at his peak, won the French Open championship in 1959 and 1960 and was runner-up in Paris on two other occasions. Read more…

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Rafael Sabatini – writer

Author of swashbucklers had the ‘gift of laughter’

Rafael Sabatini, who wrote successful adventure novels that were later made into plays and films, was born on this day in 1875 in Iesi, a small town in the province of Ancona in Le Marche.  Sabatini was the author of the international bestsellers, Scaramouche and Captain Blood, and afterwards became respected as a great writer of swashbucklers with a prolific output.  He was the son of an English mother, Anna Trafford, and an Italian father, Vincenzo Sabatini, who were both opera singers.  At a young age he was exposed to different languages because he spent time with his grandfather in England and also attended school in both Portugal and Switzerland, while his parents were on tour.  By the time Sabatini went to live in England permanently, at the age of 17, he was already proficient in several languages.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Richard Wagner: The Sorcerer of Bayreuth, by Barry Millington

Richard Wagner is both one of the most influential and most polarising composers in the history of music. Over the course of his long career, he produced a stream of spellbinding works that challenged musical convention through their richness and tonal experimentation, ultimately paving the way for modernism. The Sorcerer of Bayreuth presents an in-depth but easy-to-read overview of Wagner’s life, work and times. Making use of the very latest scholarship much of it undertaken by the author himself in connection with his editorship of The Wagner Journal, Millington reassesses received notions about Wagner and his work, demolishing ill-informed opinion in favour of proper critical understanding. It is a radical and occasionally controversial reappraisal of this most perplexing of composers. The book considers a whole range of themes, including the composer's original sources of inspiration; his fetish for exotic silks; his relationship with his wife, Cosima, and with his mistress, Mathilde Wesendonck; his anti-semitism; the operas’ proto-cinematic nature; and the turbulent legacy both of the Bayreuth Festival and of Wagnerism itself. 

Barry Millington is chief music critic for the London Evening Standard and the editor of The Wagner Journal. He has written and edited, or co-edited, seven books on Wagner, including The Wagner Compendium and The Ring of the Nibelungen: A Companion. 

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Vittorio Vanzo – conductor

Versatile musician was inspired by the operas of Wagner

Vanzo was a composer and pianist but
became best known as a conductor

Vittorio Maria Vanzo, who was passionate about the music of Wagner and introduced many of his works to Italian audiences, was born on this day in 1862 in Padua.

Vanzo toured both Italy and abroad as a piano accompanist and conductor and he also composed music himself.

His mother was from a noble family in Padua and his father was a doctor in literature and mathematics. Encouraged by his mother, Vanzo studied piano technique under the pianist and composer Melchiorre Balbi. He then went to the Conservatory of Milan, where he studied counterpoint with Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti and composition with Antonio Bazzini.

After graduating in 1881, he became a piano accompanist in the school for singing headed by the baritone Felice Varesi, and he later performed in concerts throughout Italy and in other countries.

Vanzo is perhaps best known as a conductor and interpreter of the music of the German composer, Wilhelm Richard Wagner. He had become interested in Wagner’s music while studying at the Milan Conservatory and in order to further his studies of the works of the composer, he went to Bayreuth in northern Bavaria in 1883. 

There he was able to listen to the music performed in the composer’s own theatre, the Teatro del Festival.  Wagner lived in Bayreuth for the last 11 years of his life.

In the same year, Vanzo directed a production of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, which was first staged in Parma on Christmas Day.

In 1891, he married the Norwegian soprano, Anna Kriebel, who he had met while he was conducting, and she was performing, at Teatro alla Scala in Milan. 

She took part in Wagner’s Lohengrin and Tanhauser, and Vanzo also went on to be her piano accompanist when she performed in Lieder concerts. 

The Teatro del Festival in Bayreuth, where Vanzo
travelled to listen to Wagner's music

Later that year, he conducted the first Italian performance of Wagner’s opera, La Valchiria (The Valkyrie) at the Teatro Regio in Turin, and in 1893 he revived the opera for the Teatro Comunale in Trieste. 

Vanzo also conducted Giacomo Puccini’s Edgar at the Teatro Giglio in Lucca and at the Teatro Regio in Turin.  In 1894 he conducted the orchestra of the Teatro Verdi in his home town of Padua during a run of performances of the opera, Edgar. 

During his career, Vanzo conducted operas by the Italian composers Catalani, Boito, Leoncavallo, Pergolesi, and many others.

He met the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg in Norway in 1897. Grieg had heard his interpretations for orchestra and piano, and later said he had been impressed with the technical skill and virtuosity of the conductor and composer.

In 1906, Vanzo abandoned his conducting career to devote himself to composition. He composed music for voice with piano accompaniment, chamber music, a sonata for piano and mandolin, and an opera, whose score was never published. He also opened an opera singing school in Milan.

Vanzo had three children with Anna Kriebel, who died in Milan in 1926, where the conductor and composer also died in 1945. 

Padua's Scrovegni Chapel, home to the beautiful
frescoes painted by the Florentine artist Giotto

Travel tip:

Padua, known in Italian as Padova, where Vittorio Vanzo was born, is well known as the city of Sant’Antonio (St Anthony), and is also one of the most important centres for art in Italy, and home to the country’s second oldest university. The enormous Basilica del Santo was built in the 13th century to preserve the mortal remains of Sant’Antonio, a Franciscan monk who became famous for his miracles. The church attracts pilgrims from all over the world and is rich with works of art by masters such as Titian and Tiepolo. Padova has become acknowledged as the birthplace of modern art because it is home to the Scrovegni Chapel, the inside of which is covered with frescoes by Giotto, the artist who was the first to paint people with realistic facial expressions showing different emotions. His scenes depicting the lives of Mary and Joseph, painted between 1303 and 1305, are one of the world’s most important works of art. At Palazzo Bo, Padova’s university founded in 1222, you can still see the original lectern where Galileo held his lessons. The Teatro Verdi, where Vanzo conducted the orchestra for a run of an opera in 1894, is a beautiful 18th century theatre named after the composer Giuseppe Verdi. It is located in Via del Livello in the centre of the city, close to Piazza dei Signori.

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The Conservatorio di Milano, which is now named
after the composer Giuseppe Verdi  

Travel tip:

Milan’s Conservatory of Music (Conservatorio di Musica ‘Giuseppe Verdi’), where Vanzo studied music, is in Via Conservatorio, just off Via Pietro Mascagni, behind the Duomo and a short walk from Teatro alla Scala. It was established by a royal decree of 1807, when Milan was capital of the so-called Kingdom of Italy, under the rule of Napoleon at that time. The Conservatory of Music opened the following year with premises in the cloisters of the Baroque church of Santa Maria della Passione in Via Conservatorio. It became the largest institute of musical education in Italy and its past students also include Giacomo Puccini, Amilcare Ponchielli, Arrigo Boito, Pietro Mascagni, Riccardo Muti and Ludovico Einaudi. Ironically, Giuseppe Verdi, after whom the conservatory is now named, was turned down when he applied to study there in 1832.

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More reading:

The bricklayer who became Italy’s greatest Wagnerian tenor

Errico Petrella, the Sicilian composer scorned by Wagner

How Felice Varesi became the Verdi’s first Macbeth

Also on this day:

1675: The birth of painter painter Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini

1875: The birth of writer Rafael Sabatini

1945: The liberation of Fornovo di Taro

1987: The birth of tennis star Sara Errani

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28 April

The death of Benito Mussolini

Fascist dictator captured and killed on shores of Lake Como

Benito Mussolini, the dictator who ruled Italy for 21 years until he was deposed in 1943, was killed by Italian partisans on this day in 1945, at the village of Giulino di Mezzegra on the shore of Lake Como.  The 61-year-old leader of the National Fascist Party had been captured the previous day in the town of Dongo, further up the lake, as he attempted to reach Switzerland along with his mistress, Claretta Petacci. With Nazi Germany on the brink of defeat, Mussolini had been planning to board a plane in Switzerland to fly to Spain.  Mussolini was said to have donned a Luftwaffe helmet and overcoat in the hope that he would not be recognised but the disguise did not work.  Fearing that the Germans would try to free him, as they had two years earlier when Italy's King Victor Emmanuel III placed him under house arrest in mountainous Abruzzo, the partisans hid Mussolini in a remote farmhouse.  Read more…

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Andrea Moroni – architect

Cousin of brilliant painter left mark on Padua

Andrea Moroni, who designed many beautiful buildings in Padua and the Veneto region, died on this day in 1560 in Padua.  Born into a family of stonecutters in Albino near Bergamo in Lombardy, Moroni was the cousin and contemporary of Giovan Battista Moroni, the brilliant Bergamo painter, who was also born in Albino.  Moroni the architect has works attributed to him in Brescia, another city in Lombardy about 50km (31 miles) east of Bergamo. He is known to have been in the city between 1527 and 1532 where he built a choir for the monastery of Santa Giulia.  He probably also designed the building in which the nuns could attend mass in the monastery of Santa Giulia and worked on the church of San Faustino.  As a result, he made his name with the Benedictine Order and obtained commissions for two Benedictine churches in Padua. Read more…

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Nicola Romeo - car maker

Engineer used profits from military trucks to launch famous marque

Nicola Romeo, the entrepreneur and engineer who founded Alfa Romeo cars, was born on this day in 1876 in Sant’Antimo, a town in Campania just outside Naples.  The company, which became one of the most famous names in the Italian car industry, was launched after Romeo purchased the Milan automobile manufacturer ALFA - Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili.  After making substantial profits from building military trucks in the company’s Portello plant during the First World War, in peacetime Romeo switched his attention to making cars. The first Alfa Romeo came off the production line in 1921.  The cars made a major impact in motor racing, mainly thanks to the astuteness of Romeo in hiring the up-and-coming Enzo Ferrari to run his racing team, and the Fiat engineer Vittorio Jano to build his cars. Read more…

Escape from San Vittore prison

How a terrorist and a mass murderer brought fear to streets of Milan

Milan citizens were left cowering in fear on this day in 1980 when police engaged in a prolonged shootout in the streets around San Vittore prison, which is situated less than three kilometres from the Duomo.  It followed an escape from the 19th century institution organised jointly by the notorious criminal and mass killer Renato Vallanzasca and the Red Brigades terrorist Corrado Alunni.  Vallanzasca, the head of the Milanese crime gang Banda della Comasina, had been in jail for much of the last eight years and was serving a life sentence for his role in a number of kidnappings and armed robberies, which had resulted in the deaths of a number of police officers, bank staff and members of the public.  Alunni, who had been a member of both the Red Brigades and the Communist terror group Prima Linea, had been jailed in 1978 following an armed attack on a carabinieri patrol. Read more…

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Baldus de Ubaldis – lawyer

Legal opinions have stood the test of time

An expert in mediaeval Roman law, Baldus de Ubaldis died on this day in 1400 in Pavia.  De Ubaldis had written more than 3,000 consilia - legal opinions - the most to remain preserved from any mediaeval lawyer.  His work on the law of evidence and gradations of proof remained the standard treatment of the subject for centuries after his death.  De Ubaldis was born into a noble family in Perugia in 1327. He studied law and received the degree of doctor of civil law when he was 17.  He taught law at the University of Bologna for three years and was then offered a professorship at Perugia University where he remained for 33 years.  De Ubaldis subsequently taught law at Pisa, Florence, Padua, Pavia and Piacenza.  He taught Pierre Roger de Beaufort, who became Pope Gregory XI, whose immediate successor, Urban VI, summoned De Ubaldis to Rome in 1380 to consult with him about the anti-pope, Clement VII.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Mussolini: The Last 600 Days of Il Duce, by Ray Moseley 

In his last days, Mussolini, the tyrant, was in the grip of anger, shame, and depression. The German armed forces that had sustained his puppet government since its creation in September 1943 were being inexorably driven out of Italy, the frontiers of his Fascist republic were shrinking daily and Mussolini was aware that German military leaders were negotiating with the Allies behind his back in neutral Switzerland. Mussolini: The Last 600 Days of Il Duce, Ray Moseley's well-researched and highly engaging tome, throws light on the last 20 months of the despot's life and culminates with the dramatic capture and execution of Mussolini and his mistress Claretta Petacci by partisans of the Italian resistance on April 28, 1945.

Ray Moseley was the chief European correspondent of the Chicago Tribune and in 1981 was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. He is author of the widely acclaimed Mussolini's Shadow: The Double Life of Count Galeazzo Ciano. He lives in England.

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27 April

Antonio Gramsci - left-wing intellectual

Communist leader who Mussolini could not gag

Antonio Gramsci, one of the more remarkable intellectuals of left-wing Italian politics in the early 20th century, died on this day in 1937 in Rome, aged only 46.  A founding member and ultimately leader of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), he was arrested by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime in November 1926 and sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment.   In failing health, he was granted his release after a campaign by friends and supporters but died without leaving the clinic in which he spent his final two years.  The conditions he encountered in jail led him to develop high blood pressure, angina, tuberculosis and acute gastric disorders.  Yet he found sufficient energy while imprisoned  to study the social and political history of Italy in extensive detail and to record his thoughts and theories in notebooks and around 500 letters to friends and supporters.  Read more…

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Vittorio Cecchi Gori - entrepreneur

Ex-president of Fiorentina who produced two of Italy’s greatest films

Vittorio Cecchi Gori, whose chequered career in business saw him produce more than 300 films and own Fiorentina’s football club but also saw him jailed for fraudulent bankruptcy, was born on this day in 1942 in Florence.  The son of Mario Cecchi Gori, whose production company he inherited, he provided the financial muscle behind two of Italy’s greatest films of recent years, Il Postino (1994), which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, and Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997), which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film.  He was also involved with the 1992 Oscar winner Mediterraneo, directed by Gabriele Salvatores, which also won in the Best Foreign Language film category.  Vittorio’s legacy from his father also included Fiorentina football club, of which he was president from 1993 to 2002.   Read more…

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Renato Rascel - actor, singer and songwriter

Film and TV star who wrote the iconic song Arrivederci Roma

Renato Rascel, whose remarkable career encompassed more than 60 movies, a hit 1970s TV series, representing Italy at the Eurovision Song Contest and writing one of the most famous Italian songs of all time, was born on this day in 1912 in Turin.  Rascel was Italy’s entry at Eurovision 1960 in London, singing Romantica, with which he had won the Sanremo Music Festival earlier in the year. Romantica finished eighth overall in London.  He is arguably most famous, however, for the song Arrivederci Roma, which he wrote for the 1955 film of the same name, in which he starred with the Italian-American tenor and actor Mario Lanza, which was subsequently released for English and American cinema audiences with the title Seven Hills of Rome.  Arrivederci Roma quickly became a favourite Italian song and scores of big-name singers recorded cover versions. Read more…

Charles Emmanuel III – King of Sardinia-Piedmont

Savoy king won new territory and power for his descendants

Charles Emmanuel III, a skilled soldier who ruled over Sardinia and the region of Piedmont, was born on this day in 1701 in Turin.  He became king after his father, Victor Amadeus II, abdicated his throne in 1730. Charles Emmanuel later had his father arrested when he tried to intervene in affairs of state, and had him confined to a castle for the remainder of his years.  Charles Emmanuel had a military and political education and, after he became an adult, other European countries often sought his aid in conflicts because of his skills. After becoming King of Sardinia-Piedmont, he joined in the War of the Polish Succession on the side of France and Spain.  The war was supposedly to determine who was going to be the next King of Poland, but its main results were a redistribution of Italian territory and an increase in Russian influence over Polish affairs.  Read more…

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Cesare Bianchi - head chef

From shores of Lake Como to London’s Café Royal

Cesare Bianchi, who rose from humble beginnings to become head chef at London’s prestigious Café Royal in the 1930s, was born on this day in 1897 in Cernobbio, a village on Lake Como in northern Italy.  He moved to England when he was only 16, hoping to build a career in catering and soon found work doing odd jobs in a London kitchen. However, he had been in the city barely a year when the outbreak of the First World War meant he had to return to his homeland for national service.  In his case, it was with the Alpini, Italy’s mountain brigades, with whom he was an interpreter.  Eager to resume his career in England, once the war was over Cesare took a job at the Palace Hotel in Aberdeen.  It was there he met Martha Gall, the woman who would become his wife.  They were married in 1921 and Martha soon gave birth to their daughter, Patricia.  Read more…

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Popes John XXIII and John Paul II made saints

Crowd of 800,000 in St Peter's Square for joint canonisation

Pope Francis declared Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II as saints at a ceremony during Mass in Rome’s St Peter’s Square on this day in 2014.  Hundreds of thousands of people from around the world converged on the Vatican to attend the ceremony, which celebrated two popes recognised as giants of the Catholic Church in the 20th century.  There was scarcely room to move in St Peter's Square, the Via della Conciliazione and the adjoining streets.  The crowd, probably the biggest since John Paul II’s beatification three years earlier, was estimated at around 800,000, of which by far the largest contingent had made the pilgrimage from John Paul’s native Poland to see their most famous compatriot become a saint.  Thousands of red and white Polish flags filled the square.  In his homily, Pope Francis said Saints John XXIII and John Paul II were “priests, bishops and popes of the 20th century. Read more…

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Book of the Day:  Gramsci's Political Thought: An Introduction, by Simon Roger

Antonio Gramsci was an innovative and wide-ranging thinker whose interpretations of Marxism helped rescue it from determinism and economic reductionism. In the words of cultural theorist Stuart Hall: 'Reading Gramsci has fertilised our political imagination, transformed our way of thinking, our style of thought, our whole political project'. Gramsci's creative use of terms such as hegemony, civil society and historic block adds a new dimension to political vocabulary. But the fragmentary nature of his writings, especially in the Prison Notebooks, means that it is not always easy to grasp the full significance of his ideas. Gramsci’s Political Thought: An Introduction, completely revised in 1991 and further revised in 2015, provides an account of Gramsci's work which makes his writing accessible and comprehensible for the contemporary reader. 

Roger Simon was an economist and researcher who played a major role in the 1970s and 1980s in making available and disseminating English translations of Gramsci's writings.

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