4 August

Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici - banker

Art enthusiast who was Botticelli’s major patron

The Florentine banker and politician Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, who was a significant figure in Renaissance art as the main sponsor and patron of the painter Sandro Botticelli, was born on this day in 1463.  The great-grandson of Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, the founder of the Medici bank, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco belonged to the junior, sometimes known as ‘Popolani’ branch of the House of Medici.  In 1476, when he and his brother, Giovanni, were still boys, their father, Pierfrancesco de’ Medici the Elder, died. They became wards, effectively, of their cousin, Lorenzo il Magnifico - Lorenzo the Magnificent - a member of the senior branch of the family and the effective ruler of Florence.  Relations between the two branches were tense and not helped when Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco discovered, on becoming an adult, that Lorenzo il Magnifico had plundered a considerable sum from he and his brother’s joint inheritance. Read more…

________________________________________

Giovanni Spadolini - politician

The first non-Christian Democrat to lead Italian Republic

Giovanni Spadolini, who was the Italian Republic’s first prime minister not to be drawn from the Christian Democrats and was one of Italy's most respected politicians, died on this day in 1994.  In a country where leading politicians and businessmen rarely survive a whole career without becoming embroiled in one corruption scandal or another, he went to the grave with his reputation for honesty intact.  Although he was an expert on Italian unification and became a professor of contemporary history at the University of Florence when he was only 25, a background that gave him a deep knowledge of Italian politics, he first built a career as a journalist.  He became a political columnist for several magazines and newspapers, including Il Borghese, Il Mondo and Il Messaggero, and was appointed editor of the Bologna daily II Resto del Carlino in 1955, at the age of 30.  Read more…

______________________________________

Anita Garibaldi – national heroine of Italy

Brave wife of Giuseppe Garibaldi was a freedom fighter

Anita Garibaldi, the Brazilian wife of Italy’s revolutionary hero Giuseppe Garibaldi, died in the arms of her husband on this day in 1849 in Mandriole, near Ravenna, in Emilia-Romagna.  She was pregnant and also ill with malaria, but she was having to retreat from Austrian and French troops with the Garibaldian Legion. After her death, her body had to be hurriedly buried, and it was said to have been later dug up by a dog.  A Brazilian revolutionary, Anita had fought alongside Garibaldi in his campaigns, after meeting him in her home country in 1839.  She was born Ana Maria di Jesus Ribeiro in 1821 in Laguna in Brazil. She was the third of ten children born to a poor family.  Anita met Garibaldi, who was a sailor of Ligurian descent, after he had left Europe in 1836 and was fighting on behalf of the separatist Riograndense republic in southern Brazil. Read more…

Pope Urban VII

Pope for just 12 days but introduced world's first smoking ban

Pope Urban VII was born Giovanni Battista Castagna on this day in 1521 in Rome.  Although his 12-day papacy in 1590 was the shortest in history, he is remembered as being the first person in the world to declare a ban on smoking.  He was against the use of tobacco generally, threatening to excommunicate anyone who ‘took tobacco in the porchway of, or inside a church, whether it be by chewing it, smoking it with a pipe, or sniffing it in powdered form through the nose’.  The ban is thought to have been upheld for the most part until 1724, when Pope Benedict XIII, himself a smoker, repealed it.  Castagna was the son of a nobleman of Genovese origin and studied in universities all over Italy. He obtained a doctorate in civil law and canon law from the University of Bologna.  He served as a constitutional lawyer to Pope Julius III and was then ordained a priest.  Read more…

________________________________________

Lucrezia Maria Romola de’ Medici – noblewoman

Daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent supported popes and poets

Lucrezia Maria Romola de’ Medici, who as a newborn baby inspired Sandro Botticelli’s depiction of baby Jesus in one of his paintings, was born on this day in 1470 in the Republic of Florence.  After her brother became Pope Leo X, Lucrezia helped him fund papal building projects in Florence and Rome. She also raised money to pay a ransom and secure the release of her husband when he was taken prisoner by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.  She had 11 children, many of whom were to play an important part in the history of Renaissance Europe.  Lucrezia was the eldest daughter of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Clarice Orsini. After her birth, Botticelli painted Our Lady of the Magnificat, which is now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and used her image as a baby as the model for the figure of the newborn Christ in his masterpiece.  Read more…

_______________________________________

Book of the Day: Botticelli, by Frank Zöllner

This celebration of the life and art of the Renaissance genius presents Sandro Botticelli s complete paintings and offers a comprehensive and thoroughly up-to-date study of his work.  Botticelli is one of the most admired artists of the Renaissance period and his seductive Venus and graceful Primavera are among the world s most recognisable works of art. This catalogue raisonné of Botticelli’s paintings offers more than two hundred full-colour illustrations and meticulous scholarship by the distinguished Renaissance art historian Frank Zöllner. Botticelli has luscious reproductions and exquisite detail. Presented in chronological order, the facts of Botticelli’s life and career are insightfully discussed against the background of the artistic upheaval that marked the Renaissance period. The artist's reinterpretations of ancient myths as well as his religious paintings are thoughtfully explored in a volume that will please scholars and delight lovers of fine art books everywhere.

Frank Zöllner is a German art historian. He has been a professor of art history at Leipzig University since 1996. He is among the leading authorities on the life and works of Leonardo da Vinci, about whom he has written numerous publications. 

Buy from Amazon

Home

3 August

Imperia Cognati - courtesan

Prostitute who became a celebrity

Imperia Cognati, who acquired celebrity status in Rome in the early 16th century as a courtesan to a number of rich and powerful figures, was born on this day in 1486.  Courtesans were originally the female companions of courtiers of the papal court, whose duties required them to be educated and familiar with etiquette, so that they could participate in the formalities of court life and take part in polite conversation.  In time, however, in some cases their companionship became of a more intimate nature and they became the mistresses of their courtiers, who in the papal court were clerics not permitted to marry.  It was common, too, for courtesans to be the companions of several clients simultaneously.  They were in effect a new class of prostitute, refined and educated enough to hold their own in polite society.  Read more…

_______________________________________

Omero Antonutti - actor and voice dubber

Narrator of Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful had long career

The actor Omero Antonutti, who acted in around 60 films and was the Italian voice of many international stars, was born on this day in 1935 in Basiliano, a village about 13km (eight miles) west of the city of Udine in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of northeast Italy.   His most acclaimed performance came in Padre padrone, a 1977 film directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, a Palme d’Or winner at Cannes that was considered by many critics to be the co-directing brothers’ finest work.  Antonutti worked with the Taviani brothers again on La notte di San Lorenzo (1982), which won the Grand Prix du Jury at Cannes, and Kaos (1984), in which he took the part of the playwright Luigi Pirandello in a film based on some of Pirandello’s own short stories.  He was often asked to portray significant figures in dramatisations of real-life events, such as Roberto Calvi, the ill-fated chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano. Read more…

________________________________________

La Scala - opera and ballet theatre

First night at the world’s most famous opera house

Milan’s Teatro alla Scala was officially inaugurated on this day in 1778.  Known to Italians simply as La Scala, the theatre has become the leading opera house in the world and many famous artists have appeared there. A fire had destroyed the Teatro Regio Ducale, which had previously been the home of opera in Milan. A group of 90 wealthy patrons, the owners of private boxes in the theatre, wrote to Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Este asking that a new theatre be built.  The new theatre was built on the site of the former Church of Santa Maria alla Scala, which is how the theatre got its name. The church was deconsecrated and demolished to make way for the theatre.  With the cost of the project met by the 90 patrons, who paid in advance for boxes, the new theatre was designed by neoclassical architect Giuseppe Piermarini and at the official opening on 3 August 1778, Antonio Salieri’s opera L’Europa riconosciuta was premiered.  Read more…

Antonio da Sangallo the Younger - architect

Talented Florentine was commissioned by the Popes

Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, who left his mark on Rome during the Renaissance, died on this day in 1546 in Terni in Umbria.  Sangallo was the chief architect on St Peter’s Basilica from 1520 onwards and built many other beautiful churches and palaces in the city and throughout the Papal States.  He was born Antonio Cordiani in Florence in 1484. His grandfather had been a woodworker and his uncles, Giuliano and Antonio da Sangallo, were architects.  The young man followed his uncles to Rome to pursue a career in architecture and ended up taking the name Sangallo himself.  He became an assistant to Donato Bramante and started by preparing sketches for his master.  Recognising his talent, Bramante gave Sangallo projects to complete with no more than an outline of the design and motifs.  Sangallo’s first major commission was for the Church of Santa Maria di Loreto in 1507.  Read more…

________________________________________

Francesco Ferruccio - military leader

Florentine soldier celebrated in Italy’s national anthem 

Francesco Ferruccio, the military leader whose heroic attempt to defend Florence against the powerful army of the Holy Roman Empire is recalled in Italy’s national anthem, died on the battlefield on this day in 1530.  A Florentine by birth, Ferruccio had been charged with leading the army of the Republic of Florence as the city came under attack during the War of the League of Cognac, when the Pope Clement VII connived with the emperor Charles V to overthrow the republic and restore power in Florence to his own family, the Medici.  Despite being outnumbered, Ferruccio’s soldiers engaged the Imperial forces at Gavinana, just outside Florence, killed their leader and drove them back, only for the enemy to be reinforced by the arrival of 2,000 German mercenaries under the leadership of the condottiero, Fabrizio Maramaldo.  Read more...

______________________________________

Book of the Day: The Renaissance Courtesan in Words, Letters and Images: Social Amphibology and Moral Framing, by Eugenio L Giusti

Although throughout history women had been confined to enclosed spaces, the advent of courtly life and culture required that men and women would share and interact in public arenas like the princely courts, intellectual salons, or gambling houses. But also in all of these public spaces behavioural rules and regulations aimed to control women’s bodies by equating honesty with chastity. The Renaissance Courtesan in Words, Letters and Images analyses how in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries women in general, and in particular prostitutes and courtesans, repeatedly challenged those rules in the attempt to affirm their individual freedom. This analysis has three complementary approaches: first, an historical approach where census documents and sumptuary laws are investigated in order to describe the ways in which the political establishment unsuccessfully attempts to enforce its rules over women’s behaviour; second, a literary approach where works by Castigione, Aretino, Bandello, and Veronica Franco are analysed in order to emphasise the terminological proximity between the legal and the literary languages, and the evolution of the term «courtesan» with its attribute «honest»; a third - visual - approach looks at prints of women’s clothing, made by 16th and 17th century artists.

Eugenio Giusti is Associate Professor of Italian at Vassar College in New York State. He received a PhD in Medieval Italian Literature from New York University. 

Buy from Amazon

Home

2 August

NEW - Fabio Testi - actor

Successful career followed breakthrough role in De Sica classic 

The actor Fabio Testi, whose role in an Oscar-winning 1970 drama directed by Vittorio De Sica remains his most famous, was born on this day in 1941 in Peschiera del Garda, a town on the southern shore of Lake Garda.  Testi played Giampiero Malnate, one of two young men competing for the affections of Micòl, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish intellectual in De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, with which the director won one of his four Academy Awards.  The performance led Testi to be named best new actor at the 1971 Golden Globes, the awards made annually by foreign journalists accredited in Italy.  Appearing in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis made Testi famous in Italy, representing a major breakthrough just two years after earning his big-screen debut.  Although nothing he subsequently did achieved similar heights, he went on to have a long and successful career, appearing in more than 100 films. Read more…

_________________________________________

Pietro Mascagni – composer

One opera was enough to build reputation of musician

Pietro Mascagni, the creator of the opera Cavalleria rusticana, died on this day in 1945 in Rome, at the age of 81.  Cavalleria rusticana was an outstanding success when it was first performed in Rome in 1890 and was said to have single-handedly brought the Verismo movement, in which the characters were ordinary people rather than gods, mythological figures or kings and queens, into Italian opera.  The opera’s beautiful intermezzo was used in the soundtrack of the 1980 film Raging Bull and a production of the opera was used as the setting for the climax of the 1990 film The Godfather Part III, with Michael Corleone’s son Anthony playing Turridu, the opera’s male protagonist. The film ends with the intermezzo playing.  In 2001 Andrea Bocelli recorded a song entitled Mascagni on his Cieli di Toscana album incorporating an excerpt from Cavalleria rusticana. Read more… 

________________________________________

Bologna railway station bombed

Biggest terrorist atrocity in Italy's history killed 85

Italy suffered the most devastating terrorist outrage in its history on this day in 1980 with the bombing of Bologna's main railway station.   A massive 23kg (51lbs) of explosive packed into a suitcase left in a crowded waiting room was detonated at 10.25am, creating a blast that destroyed much of the main building of the station and badly damaged a train on one of the platforms.  Many people, locals and tourists, Italians and foreign nationals, were caught up in the explosion. Some were killed instantly, others died as a result of the roof of the waiting room collapsing on to the victims. There were 85 deaths and more than 200 other people were wounded.  The bomb was clearly placed to cause mass casualties. It was the first Saturday in the traditional August holiday period and the explosive-laden suitcase was left in a room with air conditioning, then still relatively rare in Italy. Read more… 

Francis Marion Crawford – author

Novelist found inspiration while living in Sorrento

The American writer Francis Marion Crawford was born on this day in 1854 in Bagni di Lucca in Tuscany.  A prolific novelist, Crawford became known for the vividness of his characterisations and the realism of his settings, many of which were places he had visited in Italy.  He chose to settle in later life in the coastal resort of Sorrento in Campania where he even had a street named after him, Corso Marion Crawford.  Crawford was the only son of the American sculptor, Thomas Crawford. He spent his childhood going backwards and forwards between Italy and America and studied at various American and European Universities.  He spent some time in India where he found the inspiration for his first successful novel, Mr Isaacs, which was published in 1882.  In 1883 he returned to Italy to settle there permanently. Read more… 

_______________________________________

Carlo Savina - film composer and musical director

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

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. Read more… 

_________________________________________

Book of the Day: Vittorio De Sica: The Art of Stage and Screen, by Flavio De Bernardinis

Vittorio De Sica (1901-1974) is a unique film artist. While Rossellini and Visconti came into being with neorealism, De Sica matured through neorealism.  As an already established artist, he put himself wholly on the line and played a gambit that revolutionized Italian and world cinema. From 1923, the year he made his debut in a minor role with Tatiana Pavlova’s theatre company, and over the following twenty years of his career in Italian theatre and cinema, he sowed the seeds of the neorealism that would lead to his 1943 I bambini ci guardano (The Children are Watching Us). Vittorio De Sica. The Art of Stage and Screen tells his whole story, before, during and after neorealism. From the early days in theatre to his role behind the camera, De Sica runs the gauntlet of the history of the performing arts in Italy at a crucial point in time: the years straddling the decline of the theatre of the great stars of the 19th century tradition to the birth of the director’s theatre, the “talkies”, songs and gramophone records, up to the formidable season of “Sciuscià” (Ragazzi) (Shoeshine, 1946) and Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948).  

Flavio De Bernardinis (Rome, 1957) is a scholar of the history and aesthetics of cinema and entertainment. He is the author of L’arte secondo Kubrick (2003) and Arte cinematografica: il ciclo storico del cinema da Argan a Scorsese (2017). He teaches Film History and the Analysis of Film Language at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. 

Buy from Amazon

Home

Fabio Testi - actor

Successful career followed breakthrough role in De Sica classic 

The poster for the film that
made actor Fabio Testi famous

The actor Fabio Testi, whose role in an Oscar-winning 1970 drama directed by Vittorio De Sica remains his most famous, was born on this day in 1941 in Peschiera del Garda, a town on the southern shore of Lake Garda.

Testi played Giampiero Malnate, one of two young men competing for the affections of Micòl, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish intellectual in De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, with which the director won one of his four Academy Awards.

The performance led Testi to be named best new actor at the 1971 Golden Globes, the awards made annually by foreign journalists accredited in Italy.

Appearing in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis made Testi famous in Italy, representing a major breakthrough just two years after earning his big-screen debut.  Although nothing he subsequently did achieved similar heights, he went on to have a long and successful career, appearing in more than 100 films, working alongside international stars such as Oliver Reed, Anthony Quinn, Robert Mitchum, Eli Wallach and David Hemmings, as well as Charlotte Rampling, Claudia Cardinale, Franco Nero and Vanessa Redgrave.

From the 1980s onwards, he featured in dozens of television dramas, some theatre productions and, in more recent times, became a regular celebrity on reality TV programmes such as survival show L’isola dei famosi (The Island of the Famous) and Grande Fratello (Big Brother).

Despite his workload, Testi found time to turn an experiment growing kiwi fruit on his estate in northern Italy into a thriving business. At one time he was the third largest producer of kiwi fruit in Italy, growing more than 10,000 plants on a 70-hectare site.

Testi’s interest in the cinema was first sparked by seeing Lake Garda used as a backdrop for low-budget pirate films in the 1950s, when a production studio based in Peschiera del Garda would use the lake for scenes supposedly set in the Caribbean. 

He was studying to be an architect, but as a young man with a natural athletic build, he persuaded the studio that he could perform stunts as a body double. He was a stuntman in Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and briefly appeared in the same director’s Once Upon a Time in the West before making his acting big-screen debut in another of the so-called spaghetti western genre, Straniero…Fatto il segno della croce! (Stranger…Cross Yourself!) directed by Demofilo Fidani.

Fabio Testi appeared in more
than 100 films in a long career

Initially, Testi’s plan was to use the money he earned from small parts to help pay for his place at an architectural institute in nearby Verona but eventually enrolled at Verona's Academy of Fine Arts for acting classes.

Later, fearing that his early roles in all-action westerns and other genre films would lead him to be typecast, he went to England, taking acting lessons in London and some diction classes in Cambridge to improve his English.

The life-changing part of Giampiero in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a drama about life among Ferrara’s wealthy elite at a time of increasing Fascist hostility towards the Jewish community, is said to have followed a recommendation made to De Sica by Fidani.

His new-found fame set up Testi for a career that encompassed a wide range of parts, from art films and to thrillers and crime dramas, as well as in the somewhat bloodthirsty giallo murder-mystery genre that became popular with Italian audiences in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Testi’s private life for a while provided good copy for Italy’s burgeoning gossip magazines. He had relationships with several glamorous actresses, including Edwige Fenech, Charlotte Rampling, Lynne Frederick, Ursula Andress, Jean Seberg and Brooke Shields.

He has been married twice, to the Spanish actress and stylist Lola Novarro, with whom he had three children, and later to Antonella Liquori, a gallery owner.

Testi in a scene from his latest starring role, as a
retired spy in Reflection in a Dead Diamond

What turned into a lucrative sideline growing kiwi fruit came after he bought some land near Verona once owned by his grandfather. He saw kiwi fruit being grown in Los Angeles and decided, as an experiment, to see if he could grow some on his newly-acquired plot.

What began as a hobby eventually grew from a 10-acre orchard to a 70-hectare site. Other fruit producers were inspired to add kiwi fruit to their range and in time Italy became the largest grower of kiwi fruit in Europe.

Testi has continued to work in his mid-eighties. His latest big-screen starring role came as recently as 2025, in a French production entitled Reflection in a Dead Diamond (Reflet dans un diamant mort), in which he plays a retired spy living on the French Riviera, who fears old enemies have caught up with him when his beautiful nextdoor neighbour vanishes without trace.

The moat surrounding the fortified historic
centre of Peschiera del Garda

Travel tip:

Peschiera del Garda, where Fabio Testo was born, is a lakeside town on the southeastern shore of Lake Garda, distinctive for its historic centre being contained within the walls of a Venetian fortress, entirely surrounded by water. Some 30km (18 miles) west of Verona, it sits where Lake Garda flows into the Mincio river, which in turn flows into the Po southeast of Mantua. The fortress is a 16th‑century pentagonal stronghold with five bastions, later expanded by the Austrians. It is part of the UNESCO-listed Venetian Works of Defence. It is accessed on one side by the Porta Brescia, one of the monumental gates into the fortress, which has been beautifully preserved and leads directly into the old town.  To the other side is the Porta Verona, the second main gate. Inside, the centre comprises narrow streets, pastel-coloured buildings, bridges over canals, and waterfront cafes and restaurants. Beyond the fortification to the west is the long, lakeside promenade Lungomare Mazzini, which leads to a pebble beach at Lido Cappucini. 

Stay in Peschiera del Garda with Expedia

The wonderfully preserved Castello
Estense in the centre of Ferrara

Travel tip:

Ferrara is a city in Emilia-Romagna, about 50km (31 miles) northeast of Bologna. It was ruled by the Este family between 1240 and 1598. Building work on the magnificent Castello Estense, a medieval-Renaissance moated fortress in the centre of the city, began in 1385 and it was added to and improved by successive rulers of Ferrara until the end of the Este line.  The castle was purchased for 70,000 lire by the province of Ferrara in 1874 to be used as the headquarters of the Prefecture.   Ferrara is also notable for Palazzo dei Diamanti, a palace in Corso Ercole I d’Este, that takes its name from the 8500 pointed diamond shaped stones that stud the façade, diamonds being an emblem of the Este family. It was designed by Biagio Rossetti and completed in 1503. The palace now houses the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Ferrara on its first floor. With a population of 132,000, Ferrara is known for its broad Renaissance streets, its cycling culture and remarkably intact urban layout, which was given UNESCO status in 1995. Close to the Castello Estense is the Romanesque‑Gothic Duomo di San Giorgio, begun in the 12th century. Other Renaissance gems include the Palazzo Schifanoia, the Corpus Domini Monastery and the Palazzo Paradiso.

Find accommodation in Ferrara with Hotels.com

More reading:

How author Giorgio Bassani wrote The Garden of the Finzi-Continis to reflect the plight of wealthy Jewish Italians in 1930s

Lino Cappolicchio, who played Giampiero’s rival in the De Sica film

Vittorio De Sica, Oscar-winning maestro

Also on this day:

1854: The birth in Tuscany of American writer Francis Marion Crawford

1919: The birth of film composer and musical director Carlo Savina

1945: The death of composer Pietro Mascagni

1980: Terrorists bomb Bologna railway station

Home