27 March

Luca Zaia - politician

Popular president of Veneto tipped as future PM

The politician Luca Zaia, who has been spoken of as a possible candidate to be Italy’s prime minister, was born on this day in 1968 in Conegliano, in the Veneto.  Zaia was president of the Veneto region for 15 years, the maximum term allowed. When he was re-elected for the second time in 2020, he received 76.8% of the vote, the biggest share won by a regional president in Italian history.  A member of the Lega party, formerly Lega Nord (Northern League), he was regularly suggested by some commentators as a contender for the position of President of the Council of Ministers - the official title of Italy’s prime minister.  After being obliged to stand down as Veneto's president before the November 2025 regional elections, Zaia would not be drawn on his future political ambitions, saying only that he remained committed to serving the interests of Italy's north.  Read more… 

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Gianluigi Lentini - transfer record breaker

AC Milan outbid Juventus for Torino star

Gianluigi Lentini, who was for four years the world's most expensive footballer, was born on this day in 1969.  A winger with Torino known for outstanding dribbling skills, crossing accuracy and lightning pace, Lentini was the subject of a fierce bidding war between Torino's city neighbours, Juventus, and defending Serie A champions AC Milan in the summer of 1992 which ended with Milan paying a fee of around £13 million for the 23-year-old star.  It was the second time in the space of a few weeks that Milan had paid a world record sum for a player, having signed the French striker Jean-Pierre Papin from Marseille for £10 million.  At a time when the Italian league was awash with cash,the Papin record itself had been eclipsed a short while before the Lentini deal was agreed when Juventus paid Sampdoria £12 million for striker Gianluca Vialli.  Read more…

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Alessandro La Marmora - military general

Founder of Italy's famed Bersaglieri corps

The general who founded the Italian army's famous Bersaglieri corps was born on this day in 1799 in Turin.  Alessandro Ferrero La Marmora was one of 16 children born to the Marquis Celestino Ferrero della Marmora and his wife Raffaella.  The family had a strong military tradition. Alessandro was one of four of the male children who grew up to serve as generals.  La Marmora was a captain when he came up with the idea for the Bersaglieri in 1836.  He had spent much time in France, England, Bavaria, Saxony, Switzerland, and the Austrian county of Tyrol studying armies and tactics and he approached King Carlo Alberto of Piedmont-Sardinia with the idea of creating a new corps of light infantry.  He envisaged a mobile elite corps similar to the French chasseurs and Austrian jägers, trained to a high physical level and all crack marksmen.  Read more…

Sara Gama - footballer 

Role model who captained Italy Women to first World Cup quarter-final

The footballer Sara Gama, a pioneer for women’s professional football in Italy who as captain led Italy’s national team to their best performance at a FIFA Women’s World Cup, was born on this day in 1989 in Trieste.  Central defender Gama, who retired from international football in 2024 with 140 caps but still captains Juventus in the Women’s Serie A, is one of only eight female players in the Italian football Hall of Fame. She has become a role model for young girls wishing to make a career in football.  Only three Italian women have won more international caps, the peak of Gama’s international career arriving in 2019 when Italy’s women qualified under her captaincy for the World Cup finals for the first time in 20 years. Italy's quarter-final appearance was their best performance in the history of the competition. Read more…

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Joe Sentieri - singer and actor

Career remembered for international hit song

The singer, songwriter and actor Joe Sentieri, who released seven albums and around 100 singles over the course of a career spanning more than a quarter of a century, died on this day in 2007 in the Adriatic coastal city of Pescara.  Although he enjoyed considerable success in his own right, he tends to be remembered most for his association with an Italian song that became an international hit after it was translated into English.  Sentieri’s 1961 song Uno dei tanti (One of the Many) was given English lyrics by the American producing partners Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and repackaged as I (Who Have Nothing).  A hit first for the American soul and R&B star Ben E King, it was covered with great success by the British artists Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey. The Jones version reached No 14 in the Billboard Hot 100 chart, while Bassey’s was No 6 in the UK singles chart in 1963. Read more…

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Book of the Day: The Rise of the Radical Right in Italy: A New Balance of Power in the Right-Wing Camp, by Valerio Alfonso Bruno, James F Downes and Alessio Scopelliti

The Rise of the Radical Right in Italy examines developments in Italian politics in the years 2018–2022. The authors set the rise of the radical right within the context of electoral volatility and fragmentation that has underpinned post-1945 Italian politics and examine right-wing party competition between the two main radical right parties, Lega and Fratelli d’Italia, alongside the important shifts that have transformed the traditional centre-right coalition (coalizione di centro-destra) in Italian politics. The volume concludes with implications for the global trajectory of the rise of different populist and radical right parties across Europe and the European Union, with many of these radical right parties now becoming significant political players across the world.

Valerio Alfonso Bruno, a specialist on the Italian far-right, is Research Fellow at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan; James F Downes is Assistant Professor I in Comparative Politics & International Relations at Hong Kong Metropolitan University; Alessio Scopelliti is a political scientist at the University of Milan.

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26 March

Lella Lombardi - racing driver

Only woman to win points in Formula One

Maria Grazia “Lella” Lombardi, the only female driver to finish in a points position in a Formula One world championship motor race, was born on this day in 1941 in Frugarolo, near Alessandria in Piedmont.  She finished out of the points in 11 of the 12 world championship rounds which she started between 1974 and 1976 but finished sixth in the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix, a race marred by the tragic deaths of five spectators after the car being driven by the German driver Rolf Stommelen went out of control and somersaulted over a barrier into the crowd.  His was the eighth car to crash in the first 25 of the 75 laps and the race was halted four laps later when it became known there had been fatalities. At that moment, Lombardi’s March-Ford was in sixth position, albeit two laps behind race leader Jochen Mass.  Read more…

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Guccio Gucci – fashion designer

The man whose name inspired the interlocking G logo

The founder of the House of Gucci, Guccio Gucci, was born on this day in 1881 in Florence.  In the early 1900s Gucci worked as a lift boy at the Savoy Hotel in London, where he was inspired by the elegance of the wealthy people who stayed there and their smart luggage.  On his return to Florence he started making his own line of leather travel bags and accessories and in the 1920s he opened a small leather and equestrian shop in Via della Vigna Nuova.  Gucci later added handbags to his line and relocated to a bigger shop. He was fascinated with horses and his handbags featured clasps and fasteners resembling horse bits and stirrups. He gained a reputation for hiring the best craftsmen he could to work on his products.  In 1938 he expanded his business to Rome. When raw materials became scarce during the war he used materials such as hemp and linen to make his bags.  Read more…

Elio de Angelis - racing driver

The 'last gentleman racer' of Formula One

The Formula One motor racing driver Elio de Angelis was born on this day in 1958 in Rome.  His record of winning two Grands Prix from 108 career starts in F1 may not look impressive but he was regarded as a talented driver among his peers, holding down a place with Lotus for six consecutive seasons alongside such talents as Nigel Mansell and Ayrton Senna, both future world champions.  He had his best seasons in 1984 and 1985, which encompassed seven of his nine career podium finishes and in which he finished third and fifth respectively in the drivers' championship standings. Tragically, he was killed in testing the following year, having left Lotus for Brabham in frustration after perceiving that Senna was being given more favourable treatment.  De Angelis was seen by many in motor racing as "the last of the gentlemen racers."  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Lella Lombardi: The Fearless Woman Who Conquered Formula One, by Dora D Crabtree

In the male-dominated world of 1970s Formula One racing, where speeds exceeded 180 miles per hour and danger lurked at every corner, one woman refused to be intimidated. Lella Lombardi didn't just participate in the most exclusive motorsport on earth. She scored championship points, earned the respect of fellow drivers, and shattered every assumption about what women could achieve behind the wheel.  Born in a small Italian town where girls were expected to follow traditional paths, Lombardi discovered her passion for speed on the dusty roads of Piedmont. Against her family's wishes and society's expectations, she pursued racing with relentless determination. From her early days in Formula 850 to the gruelling endurance races at Le Mans, Lombardi proved her skill repeatedly. But Formula One represented the ultimate challenge, a circuit where only the fastest and bravest competed. Lella Lombardi: The Fearless Woman Who Conquered Formula One traces Lombardi's remarkable journey from her groundbreaking entry into Formula One in 1974 through her historic half-point finish at the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix. That achievement made her the only woman in history to score points in a Formula One World Championship race, a record that stands decades later. Beyond the statistics and lap times, this is a story about courage, resilience, and the price of being first.

Author Dora Crabtree drew on archive material in Britain, Italy and elsewhere, on interviews with Lella Lombardi and on first-hand accounts by friends, family and acquaintances of  the driver to paint as accurate a portrait as she could of one of the few female drivers to make an impact in the world of Formula One.

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25 March

Veronica Franco – courtesan and poet

The literary talent of a popular escort

The beautiful courtesan, Veronica Franco, was born on this day in 1546 in Venice.  A cortigiana onesta, literally 'honest courtesan', but really meaning intellectual and high class, Veronica is remembered for the quality of her poetry as well as her profession.  In the 16th century Venice was renowned for the number of its courtesans and Veronica became one of the most famous of them.  She had three brothers who were educated by tutors and fortunately her mother, a former cortigiana onesta herself, had ensured that Veronica shared that education.  Veronica was married in her mid-teens to a physician, but she soon initiated divorce proceedings.  She asked her husband to return her dowry but he refused, and with a young child to support, she had no choice but to become a courtesan.  She was a great success and was able to support her family well for the next few years.  Read more…

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Arturo Toscanini - conductor

Cellist who became orchestra leader by chance

The brilliant conductor Arturo Toscanini was born on this day in 1867 in Oltretorrente, a working-class neighbourhood of Parma, now part of Emilia-Romagna.  Toscanini came to be recognised as one of the most influential musicians of the late 19th and early 20th century. An intense individual who was a perfectionist in everything he did, as well as having a brilliant ear for detail in orchestral performances, he also had the gift of being able to remember complete musical scores after only one reading.  At various times, he was the music director at Teatro alla Scala in Milan and at the New York Philharmonic. He became particularly well known in the United States after he was appointed the first music director of the NBC Symphony Orchestra.  Toscanini had the privilege of conducting the world premieres of many of the greatest operas of his lifetime. Read more…

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Francesco I - Grand Duke of Tuscany

Florentine ruler at heart of Medici murder mystery

Francesco I, the Medici Grand Duke whose death at the age of 46 became the subject of a murder mystery still unsolved 430 years later, was born on this day in 1541 in Florence.  The second to be given the title Grand Duke of Tuscany, Francesco was the son of Cosimo I de' Medici, the first to hold the title, and Eleonor of Toledo.  Like his father, Francesco was often a despotic leader, but while Cosimo's purpose was to maintain Florence's independence, Francesco's loyalties were not so clear. He taxed his subjects heavily but diverted large sums to the empires of Austria and Spain.  He continued his father's patronage of the arts, supporting artists and building the Medici Theatre as well as founding the Accademia della Crusca and the Uffizi Gallery. He was also interested in chemistry and alchemy and spent many hours in his private laboratory.  Read more… 

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Tina Anselmi - ground-breaking politician

Former partisan became Italy’s first female cabinet minister

The politician Tina Anselmi, who made history in 1976 as the first woman to hold a ministerial position in an Italian government and later broke new ground again when she was appointed to chair the public inquiry into the infamous Propaganda Due masonic lodge, was born on this day in 1927 in Castelfranco Veneto.  Anselmi was chosen as Minister for Labour and Social Security and then Minister for Health in the government led by Giulio Andreotti from 1976 to 1979.  In 1981, she became the first woman to lead a public inquiry in Italy when she was asked to head the commission looking into the clandestine and illegal P2 masonic lodge, which had among its members prominent journalists, members of parliament, industrialists, and military leaders and was suspected of involvement in many scandals in pursuit of an ultra-right agenda.  Read more…

Giambattista Marino – poet

The colourful life of an influential literary figure

Controversial poet Giambattista Marino, who founded the school of Marinism that dominated 17th century Italian poetry, died on this day in 1625 in Naples.  Marino’s poetry was translated into other languages and many other poets imitated his use of complicated word play, elaborate conceits and metaphors.  But although Marino’s work was praised throughout Europe, he led a chaotic life, was frequently short of money and at times arrested and imprisoned for alleged immorality.  Marino, sometimes referred to as Marini, was born in Naples in 1569. He trained for the law, under pressure from his parents, but later rebelled and refused to practise his profession.  From 1590 onwards, he spent his time travelling in Italy and France and enjoying the success of his poetry. His work was circulated in manuscript form to great acclaim and later in his life he managed to get some of it published, despite censorship.  Read more…

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Mina - pop star

Italy’s all-time top selling female artist

The pop singer Anna Maria Mazzini, better known simply as Mina, was born on this day in 1940 in the Lombardy city of Busto Arsizio.  Since her debut single in 1958, Mina has sold well in excess of 150 million records, which makes her the top-selling female performer in Italian music history. Only her fellow 60s star Adriano Celentano can boast larger figures.  The pair worked together on one of Italy’s biggest-selling albums of all-time in 1998. Mina Celentano sold an impressive 2.365 million copies. They revived the collaboration in 2016 with Tutte Le Migliori.  Mina also enjoys an iconic status in the history of female emancipation in Italy as a result of the sensational ban imposed on her by the state television station Rai in 1963 following her affair with a married actor, Corrado Pani, by whom she became pregnant.  Read more…

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Saint Catherine of Siena

Pious woman from ordinary family helped the Pope reorganise the church

Caterina Benincasa, who was to one day become a patron saint of Rome, Italy and Europe, was born on this day in 1347 in Siena in Tuscany.  She is remembered for her writings, all of which were dictated to scribes, as she did not learn to write until late in life. While carrying out Christ’s work in Italy, she wrote about 380 letters, 26 prayers, and four treatises of Il libro della divina dottrina, better known as The Dialogue. These works were so influential and highly regarded she was later declared a Doctor of the Church.  Caterina was the youngest of 25 children born to Lapa Piagenti, the daughter of a poet, and Jacopo di Benincasa, a cloth dyer. She is said to have had her first vision of God when she was just five years old and at the age of seven, Caterina vowed to give her whole life to God.  She refused to get married when her parents tried to arrange it. Read more…

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Book of the Day: The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice, by Margaret F Rosenthal

The Venetian courtesan has long captured the imagination as a female symbol of sexual license, elegance, beauty, and unruliness. What then to make of the cortigiana onesta - the honest courtesan who recast virtue as intellectual integrity and offered wit and refinement in return for patronage and a place in public life? Veronica Franco was such a woman, a writer and citizen of Venice, whose published poems and familiar letters offer rich testimony to the complexity of the honest courtesan's position.  Margaret F Rosenthal draws a compelling portrait of Veronica Franco in her cultural, social, and economic world. Rosenthal reveals in Franco's writing a passionate support of defenceless women, strong convictions about inequality, and, in the eroticized language of her epistolary verses, the seductive political nature of all poetic contests. It is Veronica Franco's insight into the power conflicts between men and women - and her awareness of the threat she posed to her male contemporaries - that makes her literary works and her dealings with Venetian intellectuals so pertinent today.  Combining the resources of biography, history, literary theory, and cultural criticism, The Honest Courtesan presents an eloquent and often moving account of one woman's life as an act of self-creation and as a complex response to social forces and cultural conditions.

Margaret F Rosenthal is associate professor of Italian at the University of Southern California, and has particular interests in 16th-century literature, and Venetian and Renaissance culture.

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24 March

Giorgio Gori - politician

Mayor who steered city of Bergamo through Covid nightmare

The politician Giorgio Gori, who as Mayor of Bergamo became one of the spokespersons for Italy during the first stage of the Covid-19 pandemic, was born in Bergamo on this day in 1960.  Of almost 200,000 deaths from the virus in Italy since it was identified in a patient from the town of Codogno in February 2020, more than 48,000 have been in the Lombardy region, with the city of Bergamo and the surrounding area suffering the heaviest toll.  Bergamo province lost 4,500 citizens in the first month of the pandemic alone and is haunted by the image of a convoy of military vehicles carrying coffins away for cremation elsewhere because the city’s own crematorium could no longer cope with the numbers of dead.  As television crews descended on the city, Gori regularly agreed to be interviewed on camera and thus was seen by audiences in many countries as the story of Covid-19’s devastating impact on Italy dominated news bulletins.  Read more…

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Mimmo Jodice - photographer

Camera work with shades of metaphysical art

Domenico ‘Mimmo’ Jodice, who was a major influence on artistic photography in Italy for half a century, was born on this day in 1934 in Naples.  Jodice, who was professor of photography at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli from 1969 to 1996, was best known for his atmospheric photographs of urban scenes, especially in his home city.  Often these pictures reflected his fascination with how Italian cities habitually mix the present and the future with echoes of the past in their urban landscapes, with the incongruous juxtapositions of ancient and modern that were characteristic of metaphysical art occurring naturally as part of urban evolution.  His books Vedute di Napoli (Views of Naples) and Lost in Seeing: Dreams and Visions of Italy have been international bestsellers and he exhibited his work all over the world.  Read more…

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Dario Fo – writer and actor

Prolific playwright put the spotlight on corruption

Playwright and all-round entertainer Dario Fo was born in Leggiuno Sangiano in the Province of Varese in Lombardy on this day in 1926.  His plays have been widely performed and translated into many different languages. He is perhaps best remembered for Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997.  Fo’s early work is peppered with criticisms of the corruption, crime, and racism that affected life in Italy at the time. He later moved on to ridicule Forza Italia and Silvio Berlusconi and more recently his targets have included the banks and big business.  He was brought up near the shores of Lago Maggiore but moved to Milan to study. During the war he served with several branches of the forces before deserting. He returned to Milan to study architecture but gave it up to paint and work in small theatres presenting improvised monologues. Read more…

Luigi Einaudi - politician and winemaker

Composer's grandfather was President of the Republic

The politician, economist, journalist and winemaker Luigi Einaudi was born on this day in 1874 in Carrù, in the province of Cuneo in what is now Piedmont.   Einaudi, who is the grandfather of the musician and composer Ludovico Einaudi and the father of publisher Giulio Einaudi, was elected President of the new Italian Republic between 1948 and 1955, the second person to occupy the post.  He was actively involved with politics from his university days, when he supported socialist movements.  For a decade he edited a socialist magazine but later took a more conservative position. After being appointed to the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy in 1919, in the days when the upper house of the Italian parliament was a non-elected body, he was one of the signatories in forming the Italian Liberal Party (PLI).  The PLI initially joined forces with the Italian Fascists. Read more…

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Salvatore Viganò – dancer and choreographer

Ballet performer inspired Beethoven to compose music to suit his choreography

Salvatore Viganò, an innovative dancer who became the ballet master at La Scala opera house in Milan, was born on this day in 1769 in Naples.  He introduced the idea of ‘coreodramma’, a synthesis of dance and pantomime, in dramatic ballets based on historical and mythological themes and Shakespeare’s plays.  Viganò was born into a family of dancers and was the nephew of the composer Luigi Boccherini. When he was young, his main interests were literature and music. He studied composition with his uncle, Boccherini, and was composing his own music by the time he was a teenager.  His mother, Maria, Boccherini’s sister, had been a ballerina, and dance gradually became Viganò’s main interest. In 1788 he appeared as a dancer on the stage in Venice and the following year he performed in the coronation festivities of Charles IV of Spain.  Read more...

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Guido Menasci - poet, librettist and biographer

Respected writer and historian who found fame from an opera

The writer Guido Menasci, who is best known as a co-author of the libretto for composer Pietro Mascagni’s successful opera Cavalleria rusticana but was also a respected historian, was born on this day in 1867 in the Tuscan port of Livorno.  Menasci, a law graduate from the University of Pisa and briefly a prosecutor at the Court of Appeal in Lucca, wrote for a number of literary magazines in Italy and beyond and produced a biography of the German poet and playwright Johann Wolfgang Goethe that is considered a definitive work.  Fluent in French as well as Italian, he published books and gave lectures in Paris, often on the subject of art history, which was another of his fascinations.  Yet he was most famous for his work with Mascagni and his fellow librettist, Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti, whom he met through his involvement with literary and cultural societies in Livorno, where all three grew up.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: COVID-19 in Italy: Social Behavior and Governmental Policies, by Lucia Velotti, Gabriella Punziano and Felice Addeo

As the COVID-19 crisis began to take shape, all eyes were on Italy, the first Western country to attempt a response to the deadly pandemic. For institutional decision makers and average citizens alike, it was a time of deep uncertainty. As scientists struggled to understand the nature of the virus and how it spread, the gradualness with which information became available caused only deeper uncertainty, as did the inevitable disagreements over which protective actions the government should put in place. The Italian government eventually implemented a nationwide lockdown, which helped control the spread of the disease but simultaneously created unintended consequences for vulnerable populations, such as small business owners, women, the elderly, and workers living paycheck to paycheck.  Drawing on data surveys conducted during the transition between the first lockdown and staged reopening, COVID-19 in Italy examines people's risk perception and their willingness to trust the sources and channels of information that were available to them. It also looks at their attitudes toward the protective behaviours they were asked to adopt and the ways in which their own cultural worldviews impacted their support for pandemic response policies. With remarkable depth and candour, respondents reflected on what a post-COVID-19 Italy might look like, filling out the book with the hopes and fears of real people who had stared death in the face and lived.   

Lucia Velotti is Associate Professor of Emergency Management at the City University of New York; Gabriella Punziano is Assistant Professor in Sociology and Methodology at the University of Naples Federico II; Felice Addeo is Full Professor in Sociology at the University of Salerno.

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