11 March

Franco Basaglia - psychiatrist

Work led to closure of mental hospitals by law

The psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, whose work ultimately led to changes in the law that resulted in the closure and dismantling of Italy’s notorious psychiatric hospitals, was born on this day in 1924 in Venice.  As the founder of the Democratic Psychiatry movement and the main proponent of Law 180 - Italy's Mental Health Act of 1978 - which abolished mental hospitals, he is considered to be the most influential Italian psychiatrist of the 20th century.  His Law 180 - also known as Basaglia’s Law - had worldwide impact as other countries took up the Italian model and reformed their own way of dealing with the mentally ill.  Basaglia was born to a well-off family in the San Polo sestiere of Venice. He became an anti-Fascist in his teens and during the Second World War was an active member of the resistance in the city. Read more…

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Rigoletto debuts at La Fenice

Verdi opera staged after battle with censors

Giuseppe Verdi's opera Rigoletto was performed for the first time on this day in 1851 in Venice.  It enjoyed a triumphant first night at the Teatro La Fenice opera house, where the reaction of the audience was particularly gratifying for the composer and his librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, after a long-running battle to satisfy the censors.  Northern Italy was controlled by the Austrian Empire at the time and a strict censorship process applied to all public performances.  Verdi, who had accepted a commission to write an opera for La Fenice the previous year, knew he was likely to risk falling foul of the Austrians when he chose to base his work on Victor Hugo's play, Le roi s'amuse, which provoked such a scandal when it premiered in Paris in 1832 that it was cancelled after one night and had remained banned across France ever since.  Read more…

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Mantegna frescoes reduced to rubble

Precious works of art damaged by Allied bombing

One of the heaviest losses to Italy’s cultural heritage during World War Two occurred on this day in 1944 in Padua in the Veneto region when 15th century frescoes painted by the artist Andrea Mantegna were blown into thousands of pieces by bombs.  A raid on the city was carried out by the Allies, hoping to hit Padua’s railway station and an adjoining marshalling yard, as well as a building where the occupying Germans had established their headquarters. But the bombs landed on Padua’s Chiesa degli Eremitani instead, causing devastating damage to frescoes created by the young Mantegna in one of the side chapels.  It was one of the worst blows inflicted on Italy’s art treasures during the war, as Mantegna’s frescoes, which had been painted directly on to the walls of the church, were considered a major work.  Read more…

Torquato Tasso – poet

Troubled Renaissance writer came back to Sorrento

Torquato Tasso, who has come to be regarded as the greatest Italian poet of the Renaissance, was born on this day in 1544 in Sorrento.  Tasso’s most famous work was his epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered or The Liberation of Jerusalem), in which he gives an imaginative account of the battles between Christians and Muslims at the end of the first crusade during the siege of Jerusalem.  He was one of the most widely read poets in Europe and his work was later to prove inspirational for other writers who followed him, in particular the English poets Spencer and Byron.  The house where Tasso was born on 11 March, 1544 is in Sorrento’s historic centre, a few streets away from the main square, Piazza Tasso, in Via Vittorio Veneto.  It now forms part of the Imperial Hotel Tramontano.  Read more…

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Sidney Sonnino – politician

Minister who pushed Italy to switch sides in World War One

Sidney Sonnino, the politician who was Italy’s influential Minister of Foreign Affairs during the First World War, was born on this day in 1847 in Pisa.  Sonnino led two short-lived governments in the early 1900s but it was as Foreign Affairs Minister in 1914 that he made his mark on Italian history, advising prime minister Antonio Salandra to side with the Entente powers – France, Great Britain and Russia – in the First World War, abandoning its Triple Alliance partnership with Germany and Austria-Hungary.  His motives were entirely driven by self-interest. A committed irredentist who saw the war as an opportunity to expand Italy's borders by reclaiming former territory, he reasoned that Austria-Hungary was unlikely to give back parts of Italy it had seized previously.  Instead, he sanctioned the secret Treaty of London with the Entente powers, which led Italy to declare war on Austria-Hungary in 1915.  Read more…

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Etna’s biggest eruption

Sicily volcano spewed lava for four months

The largest eruption of the Mount Etna volcano in recorded history began on this day in 1669.  After several days of seismic activity in the area, a fissure measuring two metres wide and about 9km (5.6 miles) long opened up on the southeastern flank of the Sicilian mountain in the early hours of 11 March.  The lava that was spewed out of the enormous gash continued to flow for four months until the eruption was declared to be over on 16 July, a duration of 122 days.  Although stories of 20,000 deaths as a result of the eruption have been dismissed as myth, with no recorded evidence of any casualties, an estimated 15 towns and villages were destroyed as well as hundreds of buildings in the city of Catania, and some 27,000 people are thought to have been made homeless.  Mount Etna is situated in the northeastern vertex of the triangular island of Sicily.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: The Man Who Closed the Asylums: Franco Basaglia and the Revolution in Mental Health Care, by John Foot

In 1961, when Franco Basaglia arrived outside the grim walls of the Gorizia asylum, on the Italian border with Yugoslavia, it was a place of horror, a Bedlam for the mentally sick and excluded, redolent of Basaglia’s own wartime experience inside a fascist gaol. Patients were frequently restrained for long periods, and therapy was largely a matter of electric and insulin shocks. The corridors stank, and for many of the interned the doors were locked for life. This was a concentration camp, not a hospital.  Basaglia, the new Director, was expected to practise all the skills of oppression in which he had been schooled, but he would have none of this. The place had to be closed down by opening it up from the inside, bringing freedom and democracy to the patients, the nurses and the psychiatrists working there. Basaglia’s seminal work as a psychiatrist and campaigner in Gorizia, Parma and Trieste substantially contributed to the national and international movement of 1968. In 1978 a law was passed (the ‘Basaglia law’) which sanctioned the closure of the entire Italian asylum system. The first comprehensive study of this revolutionary approach to mental health care, The Man Who Closed the Asylums is a gripping account of one of the most influential movements in 20th-century psychiatry, which helped to transform the way we see mental illness. Basaglia's work saved countless people from a miserable existence, and his legacy persists, as an object lesson in the struggle against the brutality and ignorance that the establishment peddles to the public as common sense.

John Foot is Professor of Modern Italian History in the School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol. He has published books on sports subjects and contemporary Italian history.

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10 March

NEW - Giacomo Serpotta – sculptor

Artist could transform wet plaster into realistic scenes

Sicilian sculptor Giacomo Serpotta, whose creations in stucco have been described as turning a craft into an art, was born on this day in 1656 in Palermo.  Serpotta constructed entire scenes that included lifelike figures with realistic facial expressions. He decorated churches in his home town using stucco, a traditional material used in Sicily during the 17th century in architecture.  His decorations for the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo incorporate such a profusion of statuary that the walls appear to quiver with the movement of a crowd, according to people who have visited the church. It has been claimed by Serpotta’s biographer that the artist never left Sicily and had no exposure to the Italian baroque style, but this has never been proved one way or the other.  Serpotta was born into a family of sculptors and stucco workers. Read more… 

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Marcello Malpighi – scientist

Controversial doctor furthered the use of the microscope

Marcello Malpighi, who founded the science of microscopic anatomy, was born on this day in 1628 in Crevalcore, a town near Bologna in Emilia-Romagna.  Malpighi became a physician and biologist who developed experimental methods for studying human anatomy. As a result of his work, microscopic anatomy became a prerequisite for advances in the fields of physiology, embryology and practical medicine.  In 1646, at the age of 18, Malpighi went to study at Bologna University. Although both of his parents died when he was 21, he was fortunately able to continue with his studies.  He was granted doctorates in both medicine and philosophy in 1653 and appointed as a teacher by the university, despite not having been born in Bologna. He immediately set out to continue with his studies of anatomy and medicine.  Read more…

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Lorenzo Da Ponte - writer and impresario

Colourful life of Mozart's librettist

The librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, who could be described on two counts as a figure of considerable significance in the story of opera, was born on this day in 1749 in Ceneda - since renamed Vittorio Veneto - about 42km (26 miles) north of Treviso in the Veneto region.  Da Ponte wrote the words for 28 operas by 11 composers, including three of Mozart's greatest successes, Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte.  He also opened New York City's first opera house in 1833 at the age of 84 and is credited with introducing the United States both to Mozart and Gioachino Rossini. Da Ponte was born Emanuele Conegliano at a time when Ceneda was a strongly Jewish community. His mother, Rachele, died when he was only five and at the age of 14 he was baptised as a Catholic along with his father, who wanted to marry a Catholic girl but could do so only if he converted.  Read more…

Giuseppe Mazzini - hero of the Risorgimento

Revolutionary was ideological inspiration for Italian unification

Giuseppe Mazzini, the journalist and revolutionary who was one of the driving forces behind the Risorgimento, the political and social movement aimed at unifying Italy in the 19th century, died on this day in 1872 in Pisa.  Mazzini is considered to be one of the heroes of the Risorgimento, whose memory is preserved in the names of streets and squares all over Italy.  Where Giuseppe Garibaldi was the conquering soldier, Vittorio Emanuele the unifying king and Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour the statesman who would become Italy's first prime minister, Mazzini is perhaps best described as the movement's ideological inspiration.  Born in 1807, the son of a university professor in Genoa, Mazzini spent large parts of his life in exile and some of it in prison.  His mission was to free Italy of oppressive foreign powers, to which end he organised numerous uprisings. Read more…

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Corrado Parnucci – architectural sculptor

Prolific artist whose work adorns cities of Michigan

The architectural sculptor Corrado Giuseppe Parnucci, who left his artistic mark on more than 600 buildings in Detroit and other cities in the US state of Michigan, was born on this day in 1900 in Buti, a Tuscan village about 15km (9 miles) east of Pisa.  Taken to live in America at the age of four, Parnucci – generally known as Joe – settled in Detroit after accepting some work there in 1924.  Among the Detroit landmarks with architectural embellishments by Parnucci are the Buhl Building, The Players, the Guardian Building, the David Stott Building, the Detroit Masonic Temple, the Detroit Historical Museum and the Wilson Theater.  Most of those buildings went up during the 1920s as the city’s skyline underwent huge change.  Parnucci also sculpted work for buildings in most other major Michigan cities, including Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor and Flint.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Art and Architecture of Sicily, by Julian Treuherz

Art and Architecture of Sicily is the first book to cover the rich artistic heritage of Sicily from prehistory up to the late 20th century. Sicily’s strategic position in the centre of the Mediterranean led to settlement or conquest by a succession of different peoples - Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Muslims, Normans, Germans, French, Spanish - each one leaving its traces on Sicilian culture.  The book provides a chronological survey, each section opening with a brief historical overview which is followed by an authoritative and engaging account of the development of the period’s art and architecture. The leading architects, artists and stylistic currents are all discussed and outstanding individual buildings and works of art are analysed, some famous, others which may be unfamiliar to readers. While architecture is the principal starting point for the understanding of each period, paintings and sculpture are treated in some detail; archaeology, urban development, patronage and decorative arts are also covered.  The development of art and architecture in Sicily is not interpreted as a story of artistic conquests, but as one of acculturation and creative transformation. The author reveals that successive layering of different cultures, and the way each one interacted with its predecessors, produced art and architecture quite distinct from anywhere else in Europe. 

Julian Treuherz is an art historian who was Keeper of Art Galleries for National Museums Liverpool between 1989 and 2007. He has written many books, articles and exhibition catalogues, and over the last 20 years he has spent part of each year in Sicily studying its art and architecture.

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Giacomo Serpotta – sculptor

Artist could transform wet plaster into realistic scenes

A section of Serpotta's remarkable work in the Oratory
of San Cita in Palermo, depicting a naval battle

Sicilian sculptor Giacomo Serpotta, whose creations in stucco have been described as turning a craft into an art, was born on this day in 1656 in Palermo.

Serpotta constructed entire scenes that included lifelike figures with realistic facial expressions. He decorated churches in his home city using stucco, a traditional material used in Sicily during the 17th century in architecture.

His decorations for the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo incorporate such a profusion of statuary that the walls appear to quiver with the movement of a crowd, according to people who have visited the church.

It has been claimed by Serpotta’s biographer that the artist never left Sicily and had no exposure to the Italian baroque style, but this has never been proved one way or the other.

Serpotta was born into a family of sculptors and stucco workers. With his brother, Giuseppe, and his son, Procopio, he established his own studio in Palermo that specialised in stucco work.

Stucco is a type of building material made of aggregates, a binder, and water. It is applied wet and later hardens and can be used as a decorative coating for walls. Serpotta used it to create statues and complex wall decorations, working with it when it was still a malleable paste before it hardened irreversibly.

Serpotta’s remarkable work for the Oratory of Santa Cita includes a detailed depiction of a naval battle, inspired by the Battle of Lepanto, all made out of stucco.

His biographer, Filippo Meli, has stated that Giacomo Serpotta never left Sicily, but some experts have said his work indicates the clear influence of Roman-style baroque art. There is a theory that Serpotta may have visited Rome, but that the trip was never documented. However, this has never been corroborated.

Serpotta's eye for facial
detail was extraordinary

Some experts thought the influence of Roman baroque style to be evident in his design for an equestrian statue of Charles II, which was cast in stucco and then constructed in bronze and erected in the square of the Duomo di Messina in 1680. Unfortunately, this statue was destroyed in 1848 and so it is now known to scholars only through the drawings of it that remain.

His work, Ecstasy of Santa Monica is also believed to show Roman influence as it is a translation of Bernini’s marble sculpture through the medium of stucco.

In addition to decorating churches in Palermo, Serpotta also worked with his family on the Palermo hospital chapel, the Archbishop’s Palace in Santa Chiara, and the Badia Nuova of Alcamo.

Giacomo Serpotta has been described by an art historian as ‘a meteor in the Sicilian sky’ because of his light, graceful style. The signature he used on his work was a carving of a lizard, because the word ‘sirpuzza’ means ‘small serpent’ in the Sicilian language. An example of this signature can be seen on a gold column next to one of his statues in the Oratory di San Rosario di San Domenico. 

Stories about the churches he decorated in Sicily eventually spread to Germany, where his style went on to influence artists of the Rococo period there.

Serpotta died in 1732 in Palermo, at the age of 76.

Catania's Cattedrale di Sant'Agata is an
example of Sicily's prevalent Baroque style

Travel tip:

Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean, just off the toe of Italy’s boot. The ancient ruins, diverse architecture and wonderful cuisine enjoyed by visitors are all testament to the island’s colourful history. Watching over the island is Mount Etna, a volcano that is still active today. Palermo, the capital of Sicily, is a vibrant city with a wealth of beautiful architecture, plenty of shops and markets to browse in, and a large opera house. Sicily’s other major cities include Catania, a vibrant city of Baroque architecture sitting in the shadow of Etna, with a splendid fish market, as well as Messina, which faces the mainland in the northeast corner of the island, and the Baroque gems that are Siracusa, Noto and Ragusa. Siracusa is also famous for its Archaeological Park, which contains the remains of both a Greek theatre and a Roman amphitheatre. Agrigento, on the south coast, is home to the Valley of the Temples, one of the most outstanding examples of ancient Greek art and architecture of Magna Graecia to be found anywhere.

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Serpotta's stucco adorns the Church of
San Domenico in Palermo

Travel tip:

The Oratory of the Rosary of San Domenico, which showcases the magnificent stucco work of Giacomo Serpotta, is in the historic centre of Palermo in Via dei Bambini. Building work on the Oratory began in 1574 next to the Church of San Domenico, in the Loggia quarter. In 1714, Serpotta was commissioned by the Oratory to create, in stucco, episodes from the Apocalypse, and Allegorical statues of the Virtues to go above and between the paintings on display there. In addition to Serpotta’s sumptuous decorations, the Oratory houses paintings by important artists such as Matthias Stom, Pietro Novelli, Valerio Castello and Luca Giordano as well as an altarpiece by Anthony van Dyck, the Flemish Baroque painter, whose depiction of the Madonna of the Rosary with Saints Dominic, was commissioned during the period of the 1624 plague. Van Dyck spent six years in Italy, based mainly in Genoa. He was visiting Palermo at the time of the plague outbreak and remained quarantined there.

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More reading:

The unsolved theft of a Caravaggio masterpiece from Palermo's Oratory of San Lorenzo

Giovanni Battista Vaccarini, the architect who shaped the look of Catania

How the devastation of a massive earthquake led to Sicily’s architectural rebirth

Also on this day: 

1628: The birth of scientist Marcello Malpighi

1749: The birth of librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte

1872: The death of Risorgimento inspiration Giuseppe Mazzini

1900: The birth of architectural sculptor Corrado Parnucci

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9 March

Amerigo Vespucci – explorer

Medici clerk who discovered a new world

Explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci was born on this day in 1454 in Florence.  Vespucci was the first to discover the ‘new world’, which later came to be called the Americas, taking the Latin version of his first name.  He was the son of a notary in Florence and a cousin of the husband of the beautiful artist’s model, Simonetta Vespucci. He was educated by his uncle, Fra Giorgio Antonio Vespucci, a Dominican friar, and he was later hired as a clerk by the Medici family.  He acquired the favour of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, who sent him to the Medici office in Cadiz in Spain to investigate the managers, who were under suspicion.  Later, as the executor of an Italian merchant who had died in Seville, Vespucci fulfilled the deceased’s contract with Castile to provide 12 vessels to sail to the Indies. Read more…

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Internazionale - football superpower

Famous club that broke away from rivals AC Milan

Internazionale, one of Italy's most successful football clubs, came into being on this day in 1908.  The winner 20 times of lo scudetto - the Italian championship - the club known often as Inter or Inter-Milan was born after a split within the membership of the Milan Cricket and Football Club, forerunner of the club known now as A C Milan.  The original club was established by expatriate British football enthusiasts with a membership restricted to Italian and British players. It was after a dispute over whether foreign players should be signed that a breakaway group formed.  Plans for a new club were drawn up at a meeting at the Ristorante L'Orologio in Via Giuseppe Mengoni in Milan, a short distance from the opera house, Teatro alla Scala.  It was a restaurant popular with theatregoers and artists, among them Giorgio Muggiani, a painter who would become renowned for his work in advertising. Read more…

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Bettino Ricasoli - statesman and winemaker

Prime minister and inventor of modern Chianti wine

The politician and winemaker Barone Bettino Ricasoli was born on this day in 1809 in Florence.  Ricasoli, who is considered one of the driving forces of the Risorgimento alongside Giuseppe Mazzini, Count Camillo Benso of Cavour, Giuseppe Garibaldi and others, succeeded Cavour as prime minister in 1861, the second person to hold the office in the new Kingdom of Italy.  After withdrawing from politics, he concentrated on the family vineyards around the Castello di Brolio in the Tuscan hills between Siena and Arezzo, seat of the Ricasoli family since the early 12th century.  It was there in 1872, seeking to create a wine with universal appeal, that he developed the formula for Chianti wine that is still used today, made up of 70 per cent Sangiovese grapes, 15 per cent Canaiolo and 15 per cent Malvasia bianca.  Read more…

Nabucco premieres in Milan

Verdi opera that became a symbol of the Risorgimento

The opera Nabucco, with music by Giuseppe Verdi and a libretto by Temistocle Solera, was first performed on this day in 1842 at Teatro alla Scala in Milan.  The opera contains the famous chorus Va, pensiero, a lament for a lost homeland that many Italians now regard as their unofficial national anthem.  The opera and Verdi himself have become synonymous with the Risorgimento, the period in the 19th century when people worked to free the Italian states of foreign domination and unite them under the leadership of Victor Emmanuel, the King of Sardinia and Duke of Savoy.  It is said that during the last years of the Austrian occupation of Lombardia and the Veneto, for example, that Italian patriots adopted Viva Verdi as a slogan and rallying call, using the composer’s name as an acronym for 'Vittorio Emanuele Re d’Italia' - 'Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy'.  Read more…

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Andrew Viterbi – electrical engineer and businessman

The amazing life of 'the father of the mobile telephone'

Andrew Viterbi, who invented the Viterbi algorithm and co-founded the American multinational corporation Qualcomm, was born Andrea Giacomo Viterbi on this day in 1935 in Bergamo in the Lombardy region of Italy.  The Viterbi algorithm is still used widely in cellular phones and other communication devices for error correcting codes as well as for speech recognition, DNA analysis and other applications. Viterbi also helped to develop the Code Division Multiple Access standard for cell phone networks.  He is recognised in Italy as ‘il padre del telefonino’ - the father of the mobile telephone.  Viterbi’s father, Achille, was director of Bergamo Hospital’s ophthalmology department, and his mother, Maria Luria, had a teaching degree. But after Mussolini introduced his new racial laws in Italy before the start of World War II, the couple, who were both Jewish, were deprived of their positions and could no longer support their family.  Read more…

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Emma Bonino – politician

Leading Radical learnt Arabic to understand Middle East press

Veteran politician Emma Bonino, who most recently served as Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Government of Enrico Letta, was born on this day in 1948 in Bra in Piedmont.  A leading member of the Italian Radicals, Bonino has throughout her career been an activist for reform policies and a campaigner for women's and human rights.  Bonino graduated in modern languages and literature from Bocconi University in Milan in 1972. She founded the Information Centre on Sterilisation and Abortion in 1975 and promoted the referendum that led to the legalisation of abortion in Italy.  She was first elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies in 1976 and was re-elected six times afterwards.  In 1986 Bonino was among the promoters of a referendum against nuclear energy, which led to the rejection of a civil nuclear energy programme in Italy.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America, by by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

In Amerigo, Felipe Fernández-Armesto answers the question "What's in a name?" by delivering a rousing flesh-and-blood narrative of the life and times of Amerigo Vespucci. Here we meet Amerigo as he really was: a rogue and raconteur who counted Christopher Columbus among his friends and rivals; an amateur sorcerer who attained fame and honor through a series of disastrous failures and equally grand self-reinventions. Filled with well-informed insights and amazing anecdotes, this magisterial and compulsively readable account sweeps readers from Medicean Florence to the Sevillian court of Ferdinand and Isabella, then across the Atlantic of Columbus to the brave New World where fortune favored the bold.  Amerigo Vespucci emerges from these pages as an irresistible avatar for the age of exploration-and as a man of genuine achievement as a voyager and chronicler of discovery. And now, in Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America, this mercurial and elusive figure finally has a biography to do full justice to both the man and his remarkable era.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, born in London, is William P. Reynolds Professor of History at the University of Notre-Dame in Indiana and former chair of History at Queen Mary College, University of London. 

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