24 November

NEW - Pope Pius IX flees Rome

The day the Pope had to slip out of the side door of his palace

Fearing for his own safety, Pope Pius IX left his home in Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome, disguised as an ordinary priest, and fled from the city on this day in 1848. It was an unwelcome change of circumstances for Pius IX, who had enjoyed great popularity since being elected as Pope two years before. But the day before his escape from Rome, he had found himself besieged inside his palace by an unruly mob that had gathered in Piazza del Quirinale.  Revolutionary fever had been whipped up and the city was in turmoil following the murder of Count Pellegrino Rossi at Palazzo della Cancelleria, the seat of the government of the Papal States in Rome. This event eventually led to the formation of the short-lived Roman Republic.  Rossi had been the Minister of the Interior in Pope Pius IX’s government and had been responsible for a programme of unpopular reforms. Read more…

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Carlo Collodi - journalist and writer

Satirical journalist created Pinocchio to express his own views 

Carlo Collodi, in real life Carlo Lorenzini, was born on this day in 1826 in Florence.  Although he was a satirical journalist who supported the cause of the Risorgimento, Collodi is best remembered for his stories for children about the character, Pinocchio.  The writer was brought up in the small town of Collodi where his mother had been born and he adopted the name of her birthplace as a pen name.  After becoming interested in politics he started the satirical newspaper, Il Lampione, in 1848. This was censored by order of the Grand Duke of Tuscany so in 1854 he started Lo Scaramuccia, which was also controversial.  In 1856 he wrote his first play for the theatre and, after Italian unification in 1861, he turned his attention to writing for children.  Collodi’s stories about his first main character, Giannettino, were a way of expressing his own political ideas through allegory.  Read more…

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Lucky Luciano - Mafia boss

Sicilian who brought order among warring clans

Charles 'Lucky' Luciano, the mobster best known for shaping the structure of Italian-dominated organised crime in the United States, was born Salvatore Lucania on this day in 1897 in Lercara Friddi, a town about 70km (44 miles) south-east of the Sicilian capital, Palermo.  Raised in New York's Lower East Side after his family emigrated in 1906, it was Luciano who famously put the New York underworld into the control of the so-called Five Families and also set up The Commission, which served as a governing body for organised crime nationwide.  After he was jailed in 1936 on extortion and prostitution charges, Luciano is said to have struck a deal with the American authorities to use his criminal connections to help the Allies in their invasion of Sicily, a vital first step in driving the German forces and their supporters out of the Italian peninsula.  Read more…

Pietro Torrigiano – sculptor

Achievements overshadowed by assault on Michelangelo

Pietro Torrigiano, the sculptor credited with introducing Renaissance art to England in the early years of the 16th century but who is best remembered for breaking the nose of Michelangelo in a fight, was born on this day in 1472 in Florence.  The incident with the man who would become the greatest artist of their generation came when both were teenagers, studying in Florence under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici.  Torrigiano was older than Michelangelo by two and a half years and confessed some years later that he found his young rival irritating, especially since it was his habit to peer over the shoulders of his fellow students and make disparaging comments about their work. On the occasion they clashed, when Michelangelo was said to be about 15, he was with Torrigiano and some others in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, studying frescoes by Masaccio.  Read more…

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Vittorio Miele - artist

Painter scarred by Battle of Monte Cassino

The 20th century artist Vittorio Miele, who found a way to express himself in art after losing his family in the Battle of Monte Cassino, was born in Cassino on this day in 1926.  Miele was a teenager when his hometown and the mountain-top Benedictine monastery witnessed one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War as Allied armies attempted to break the Gustav Line of the Axis forces.  Over a three-month period, the Allies made four assaults, each backed up by heavy bombing, and though the objective was eventually achieved it was at a very high price. There were at least 80,000 soldiers killed or wounded, as well as countless civilians caught in the crossfire.  Miele lost his father, mother and sister. He survived but left the area as soon as he was able, settling 400km (249 miles) north in Urbino in the Marche. Read more…

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Book of the Day: The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy Since 1796, by Christopher Duggan

The greatness of Italy's culture and way of life have had a powerful attraction for many generations of visitors. This has created an overwhelming sense that Italy is a fundamentally benign and easy going country. The Force Of Destiny, Christopher Duggan's immensely enjoyable book, lays waste to this idea. While sharing everyone's enthusiasm for Italy as a place, he strongly distinguishes this from its political role over the past two centuries, which has been both vicious and ruinous for Europe as a whole.  Verdi's great opera, The Force Of Destiny, one of the key works celebrating Italy's wish for independence, also points to Italy's fundamental problem. Throughout the 19th century Italy struggled to unite under one rule all Italian speakers, throwing aside a multitude of corrupt old rulers and colonial occupiers. Through all these struggles, the politicians of Italy felt impelled by a 'force of destiny' hideously at odds with Italian reality. After immense struggle and with endless sacrifices, a united Italy was at last created which proved to be as impoverished, backward and marginal as it had been before. The resentments this created fed into Italy's overwhelmingly destructive role, as colonial predator, as a faithless and ruinous element in the First World War: these resentments in turn led to the rise of Mussolini who, far more than Hitler, wrecked the European order in the '20s and '30s. It was only the humiliation and disaster of the Second World War that, at last, made Italy into a reasonably 'normal' and constructive country.

The late Christopher Duggan was a world-leading historian of Modern Italy. Professor of Italian History at the University of Reading when he died in 2015. His books include A Concise History of Italy, Francesco Crispi: 1818-1901 and Fascist Voices: Mussolini’s Italy 1919-1945. 

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