8 July

Death of the poet Shelley

Dramatic storm took the life of young literary talent

English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley died on this day in 1822 while travelling from Livorno in Tuscany to Lerici in Liguria in his sailing boat, the Don Juan.  Just a month before his 30th birthday, the brilliant poet of the Romantic era drowned during a sudden, dramatic storm in the Gulf of La Spezia that caused his boat to sink.  His body was later washed ashore and, in keeping with the quarantine regulations at the time, was cremated on the beach near Viareggio on the Tuscan coast.  Shelley had been living with his wife, the writer Mary Shelley, at a rented villa in Lerici and was returning to his home from Livorno, where he had been arranging the start-up of a new literary magazine to be called The Liberal.  He had set sail with two other people on board the Don Juan at about noon on Monday 8 July.  Read more… 

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Gian Giorgio Trissino – dramatist and poet

Innovative playwright spotted the potential of Palladio

Literary theorist, philologist, dramatist and poet Gian Giorgio Trissino was born on this day in 1478 in Vicenza.  As well as his contribution to Italian culture, Trissino is remembered for educating and helping Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, a young mason he discovered working on his villa in Cricoli, just outside Vicenza.  He took the young man on two visits to Rome that profoundly influenced his development into a great architect and he gave him the name Palladio, after the Greek goddess of wisdom, Pallas Athene.  Trissino had been born into a wealthy family and was able to travel widely, studying Greek in Milan and philosophy in Ferrara. He was part of Niccolò Machiavelli’s literary circle in Florence before he settled in Rome, where he associated with the humanist and poet, Pietro Bembo. He became a close friend of the dramatist, Giovanni Rucella, and served Popes Leo X and Clement VII.  Read more… 

Ernest Hemingway – American novelist

War wounds sustained in Italy inspire the great American novel

An 18-year-old American Red Cross driver named Ernest Hemingway was severely wounded by shrapnel from an Austrian mortar shell on this day in 1918 at Fossalta di Piave in the Veneto.  Hemingway was taken to a field hospital in Treviso, from where he was transferred by train to a hospital in Milan. While in the hospital and recovering after two operations, he fell in love with his nurse, 26-year-old Agnes von Kurowsky.  His experiences of being wounded in Italy and falling in love later inspired him to write the novel, A Farewell to Arms.  On leaving school Hemingway had worked briefly as a reporter for The Kansas City Star before leaving for the Italian front in World War One to enlist as an ambulance driver.  While stationed at Fossalta di Piave he was bringing chocolates and cigarettes to the men on the front line when he was seriously injured by mortar fire. Read more… 

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Artemisia Gentileschi – painter

Brilliant artist who survived torture by thumbscrews 

Artemisia Gentileschi, who followed in the footsteps of the Baroque painter Caravaggio by painting biblical scenes with dramatic realism, was born on this day in 1593 in Rome.  As a young woman she was raped by an artist friend of her father who had been entrusted with teaching her, and when he was brought to trial by her father she was forced to give evidence under torture.  This event shaped her life and she poured out her horrific experiences into brutal paintings, such as her two versions of Judith Slaying Holofernes.  Gentileschi was notable for pictures of strong and suffering women from myths, allegories, and the Bible. Some of her best known themes are Susanna and the Elders, Judith Slaying Holofernes, the most famous version of which, completed in 1620, is in the Uffizi in Florence, and Judith and Her Maidservant.    Read more…

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Book of the Day: Shelley: The Pursuit, by Richard Holmes

A reissue of Richard Holmes’s epic biography of this most enigmatic and intriguing of the Romantic poets. This is simply one of the greatest biographical achievements of recent years.  Shelley, the most neglected of all the great Romantic poets, was born in Sussex in 1792 and died in Tuscany in 1822, a brief life packed with love affairs, alarms and excursions. Shelley: The Pursuit offers a serious and critical reappraisal of Shelley as a man and a writer; all his prose and poetry is carefully re-examined, his sense of spiritual and geographical isolation brilliantly described and a detailed portrait of his macabre imaginative life slowly assembled.  Shelley’s intense friendships with some of the most remarkable figures of his age fill Holmes’s pages with a vivid panorama of revolutionary idealism and recklessness. To this is added the private story of Shelley’s tortuous romantic liaisons, complications which affected both the peculiar tenor of his daily life and the remotest conceptions of his poetry. This is a stunning, entrancing biography of a fascinating subject, and a timely reissue of a seminal work.

Richard Holmes was born in London in 1945 and attended Churchill College, Cambridge.  In 1974 his Shelley: The Pursuit won the Somerset Maugham Award and was described by Stephen Spender as ‘surely the best biography of Shelley ever written’.  

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7 July

NEW - Quintino Sella - economist, scientist and mountaineer

Statesman who laid financial foundations for unified Italy

Quintino Sella, a politician and economist widely credited with building the foundations for economic stability in post-unification Italy, was born on this day in 1827 in Mosso, a small town in the province of Biella in northern Piedmont.  Sella served as Minister of Finance under three governments between 1862 and 1872.  The newly unified Italy inherited an enormous budget deficit from the collection of disparate regional states that preceded it, but Sella was instrumental in steering the country toward fiscal stability by enforcing rigorous public spending cuts, securing early land tax payments, and pushing through the controversial "grist tax" - a tax on flour - to balance the national budget.  He also influenced the shape of the new nation by persuading the king, Victor Emmanuel II, to seize control of Rome in 1870 when the French garrison that was protecting the independence of the city under Pope Pius IX was withdrawn. Read more… 

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Gian Carlo Menotti - composer and librettist

Founded Spoleto festival after finding fame in the United States

Gian Carlo Menotti, who wrote more than two dozen operas and founded the annual Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, was born on this day in 1911 in the village of Cadegliano-Viconago, on the Swiss-Italian border.  A prodigiously talented child who began to write music at the age of seven, Menotti was sent to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia as a teenager and settled in the United States.  For many years he was the partner - professionally and in life - of the brilliant American composer, Samuel Barber.  Menotti wrote the libretto for Barber’s 1957 work Vanessa, which is regarded as one of the 20th century’s finest operas.  Two of Menotti’s own operas, The Consul (1950) and The Saint of Bleecker Street (1955), won Pulitzer Prizes.  He created the Festival dei Due Mondi in 1957 out of a desire to make his mark in the country of his birth. Read more…

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Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola - architect

Legacy of beautiful Renaissance buildings throughout Italy

One of the great architects of the 16th century, Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, died on this day in 1573 in Rome.  Often referred to simply as Vignola, the architect left the world with a wealth of beautiful buildings and two acknowledged masterpieces, the Villa Farnese at Caprarola and the Church of the Gesù in Rome.  Along with Andrea Palladio and Sebastiano Serlio, Vignola was responsible for spreading the style of the Italian Renaissance throughout Europe.  He was born at Vignola near Modena in Emilia-Romagna in 1507. He began his career as an architect in Bologna and then went to Rome to draw Roman temples. He was invited to Fontainebleau  to work for King Francois I, where it is believed he first met the Bolognese architect, Serlio.  Back in Italy he designed the Palazzo Bocchi in Bologna and then moved to Rome to work for Pope Julius III. Read more… 

Michele Amari – politician, historian, and writer

Scholarly revolutionary became a leading translator of mediaeval Arabic

Patriotic Sicilian revolutionary Michele Amari was born on this day in 1806 in Palermo.  Amari published a history in 1842 of the War of the Sicilian Vespers, was a minister in the Sicilian revolutionary government in 1848, and was part of Garibaldi’s revolutionary cabinet in Sicily in 1860.  He embraced the cause of Italian unification and helped prepare Sicilians for the annexation of Sicily by the Kingdom of Sardinia. During his later years, he served as a Senator of the new Kingdom of Italy.  A grandson of the third Count Amari of Sant’Adriano, he grew up in an aristocratic household. The title had been acquired in 1772 by one of his ancestors, who had held the hereditary office of the administrator of the royal tobacco monopoly.  Michele Amari lived with his grandfather in the centre of Palermo after his father, Ferdinando, had financial problems caused by his gambling. Read more…

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Vittorio De Sica - film director

Oscar-winning maestro behind 1948 classic Bicycle Thieves

Vittorio De Sica, the director whose 1948 film Bicycle Thieves is regarded still as one of the greatest movies of all time, was born on this day in 1901 in Sora in Lazio.  Bicycle Thieves, a story set in the poverty of post-War Rome, was a masterpiece of Italian neorealism, the genre of which the major figures, in addition to De Sica, were Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini and Giuseppe de Santis and, to a smaller degree, Federico Fellini.  The movie was one of four that landed Academy Awards for De Sica. Another neorealist movie, Shoeshine (1948), won an honorary Oscar, while Bicycle Thieves won a special award as an outstanding foreign language film before the Best Foreign Language Film category was introduced.  De Sica would later win Oscars in that section for Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970).  Read more…

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1990 World Cup - Italy’s consolation prize

Azzurri beat England for third place

Italy beat England 2-1 in Bari to claim third place in the World Cup finals, of which they were the host nation, on July 7, 1990.  It was a small consolation for the team, managed by Azeglio Vicini, who had played some of the best football of all the competing nations to reach the semi-finals, only to be held to a 1-1 draw by Argentina in Naples and then lose the match on a penalty shoot-out.  Their heartbreak mirrored that suffered by England, who had also suffered a defeat on penalties in their semi-final against West Germany in Turin.  Many neutrals believed that Italy and England would have been more worthy finalists, particularly in retrospect after West Germany had beaten Argentina by a penalty five minutes from the end of 90 minutes in a match of cynical fouls and attritional football that is seen as the poorest World Cup final in the competition’s history.  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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Quintino Sella - economist, scientist and mountaineer

Statesman who laid financial foundations for unified Italy

Quintino Sella had a major
influence on the unified Italy 

Quintino Sella, a politician and economist widely credited with building the foundations for economic stability in post-unification Italy, was born on this day in 1827 in Mosso, a small town in the province of Biella in northern Piedmont.

Sella served as Minister of Finance under three governments between 1862 and 1872.

The newly unified Italy inherited an enormous budget deficit from the collection of disparate regional states that preceded it, but Sella was instrumental in steering the country toward fiscal stability by enforcing major public spending cuts, securing early land tax payments, and pushing through the controversial "grist tax" - a tax on flour - to balance the national budget. 

He also influenced the shape of the new nation by persuading the king, Victor Emmanuel II, to seize control of Rome in 1870 when the French garrison that was protecting the independence of the city under Pope Pius IX was withdrawn to fight in the Franco-Prussian War.

Piedmontese troops led by General Raffaele Cadorna broke through the city walls near Porta Pia, enabling Victor Emmanuel to take up residence in the Quirinale Palace and declare unification complete.

Away from politics, Sella was a passionate climber. He founded the Italian Alpine Club in Turin in 1863, helping to popularise mountaineering in Italy.

A scientist with a detailed knowledge of mining and minerals, he also  promoted and helped found the Italian Geological Society.

Sella was born in the hamlet of Sella di Valle Superiore in the municipality of Mosso, about 20km (12 miles) from the small city of Biella and just over 90km (54 miles) northeast of the regional capital of Turin.

He was the eighth of 20 children born to Maurizio and Rosa Sella. The Sella family had been active in the wool processing industry since the 17th century.  The family had a strong religious vocation and after Maurizio acquired some land on the bank of the Cervo stream in Biella in 1835, he opened silk and woolen mills which provided employment and a refuge for young women who found themselves in difficult circumstances. 

The Sella family had their own living quarters within the mill.

Quintino’s father earmarked him as a future head of the mechanical sector of the company and steered him towards the study of hydraulic engineering. After obtaining his degree with honours at the University of Turin, he furthered his education at the prestigious École des Mines in Paris.

Sella served as Minister of
Finance in three governments

He remained in the academic world as a distinguished professor of mathematics and mineralogy at the Polytechnic University of Turin, gaining an international reputation in crystallography.

Sella’s political career began with his participation in councils and commissions in the education sector before he was encouraged to stand for election to the Chamber of Deputies for Cossato, near Biella. 

Once elected, he quickly established himself as one of the most prominent figures aligned with the Historical Right. After a spell as secretary general at the Ministry of Education, he was appointed Minister of Finance on three occasions, in the governments of  Urbano Rattazzi (1862), Alfonso La Marmora (1864-65) and Giovanni Lanza (1869-7).

It was under Marmora that he devoted himself to balancing the state budget, implementing the necessary policy of economies and tax increases on consumption and income, sometimes resorting to unpopular measures. 

Easily the most controversial of these was the so-called grist tax - Tassa sul Macinato - introduced in 1868. A tax on milling grain, it applied to wheat, corn, rye, and oats.

However, the tax provoked a huge public backlash. It was labelled a tax on poverty, disproportionately harming the poor.  After violent protests erupted across Italy in 1869, the government deployed the military to crush the uprisings. More 250 protestors were killed, another 1,000 wounded and thousands arrested. 

Saluzzo in Piedmont, with the distinctive shape
of the Monviso peak in the background

The grist tax caused the fall of the La Marmora government but remained in force until it was abolished under the left-wing government of Agostino Depretis in 1883. Sella was ultimately credited with achieving his objective of pulling the newly unified Kingdom of Italy out of near-bankruptcy and putting it on a stable financial path.  

Despite his involvement in politics, Sella always made time for his mountaineering hobby. In 1863, he led the first all-Italian team to reach the summit of Mont Viso, also known as Monviso, the pyramid-shaped highest peak of the Cottian Alps in Piedmont at 3,841m (12,601ft). This feat proved Italian climbers could compete with British alpinists. 

In the same year as his Monviso success, Sella founded the Club Alpino Italiano (Italian Alpine Club) in Turin. It aimed to map the Alps and foster national pride. He used his climbs to study Alpine geology, mineralogy, and glaciers. 

Married with seven children, Quintino Sella died 1884 at the age of 56 in his home inside the wool mill and was buried in the monumental cemetery of Oropa, about 15km (nine miles) from Biella, in a monumental family tomb in the shape of a pyramid. 

Piazza della Cisterna is a beautiful square in
Biella's elevated Biella Piazzo area 

Travel tip:

Biella, the nearest city to Sella’s home, is a well-established municipality of almost 45,000 inhabitants in the foothills of the Biellese Alps, about 85km (53 miles) northeast of Turin and slightly more than 100m (62 miles) west of Milan. The city is divided into two levels: Biella Piano (the lower, bustling plain) and Biella Piazzo (the elevated, medieval heart), the latter accessible by a free funicular railway, giving access to its cobbled streets, terraced panoramic views, and aristocratic palaces such as Palazzo La Marmora and Palazzo Gromo Losa. The lower town is not without attractions, which include a Roman baptistery from the early 1000s - Battistero di San Giovanni Battista - in Piazza Duomo, adjacent to the church and convent of San Sebastian. Wool and textiles have been associated with the town since the 13th century and it was once described as ‘the Manchester of Italy’. Although the best years of the industry have now passed, with many mills and factories closed, brands such as Cerruti 1881, Ermenegildo Zegna, Vitale Barberis Canonico and Fila still have a presence.

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One of the Ricetto di Candelo's
typical cobbled streets

Travel tip:

Cossato, where Quintino Sella stood for the Chamber of Deputies, is a prominent town in the province of Biella, the second-largest town in the province by both land area and population, housing roughly 14,000 residents. Over the centuries, Cossato’s identity became intertwined with Northern Italy's textile boom. The town evolved into a centre for wool and textile processing. While it has modernised over time - evidenced by a major recent architectural renovation of its central town square - it maintains traditional Piedmontese charm, with its town centre extending along major roadways and giving way to numerous historic hamlets scattered across the surrounding hills.  Cossato serves as a gateway to the unique landscapes of the Biellese territory, popular for mountain biking and hiking, characterized by dramatic, heavily-eroded orange-red rock formations. Located just five minutes away, the Ricetto di Candelo is a remarkably preserved 14th-century fortified medieval village, complete with pebbled streets, ancient turrets, and artisan shops. Cossato sits on the Biella-to-Novara railway line, which keeps the town well-connected for commuters and tourists. 

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More reading:

Why the Battle of Bezzecca was a significant victory in the push for unification

The general who founded the Italian army's famous Bersaglieri corps

The 1870 capture of Rome that completed Italian unification

Also on this day:

1573: The death of architect Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola

1806: The birth of Sicilian revolutionary Michele Amari

1901: The birth of actor and film director Vittorio De Sica

1911: The birth of composer and librettist Gian Carlo Menotti

1990: Italy beat England to finish third in 1990 World Cup

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6 July

Cesare Mori - Mafia buster

'Iron Prefect' who 'eliminated' the Cosa Nostra

Cesare Mori, the prefect of police credited with crushing the Sicilian Mafia during the inter-War years, died on this day in 1942 at the age of 70.  At the time of his death he was living in retirement in Udine, in some respects a forgotten figure in a country in the grip of the Second World War.  Yet during his police career his reputation as a hard-line law enforcer was such that the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini personally appointed him as prefect of Palermo, charged with breaking the Mafia’s hold over Sicily and re-establishing the authority of the State by any means necessary.  Mori was born in Pavia in Lombardy, by then part of the new Kingdom of Italy, in 1871.  His upbringing was difficult.  His first years were spent living in an orphanage, although his parents were not dead and looked after him after he had turned seven.  He attended the Military Academy in Turin.  Read more…

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Pietro Valpreda - the ‘bomber’ who never was

Jailed suspect acquitted after 16 years

Pietro Valpreda, who was arrested following the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan in December 1969 and was held for 16 years awaiting trial as a terrorist before being acquitted, died on this day in 2002.  The Piazza Fontana bombing killed 17 people and injured 88 others after a device was detonated inside the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura in Piazza Fontana, which is just a few streets away from the Duomo in the centre of Milan.  Valpreda was an anarchist sympathiser but insisted he was at home on the afternoon of the incident, being cared for by an aunt, who swore under police questioning that her nephew, who was a dancer with a vaudeville company, was suffering from flu.  He was charged, however, on the evidence of a taxi driver, Cornelio Rolandi, who said he dropped a man fitting Valpreda’s description in the vicinity of the bank. Read more…

Battle of Fornovo

League of Italian states band together to send the French army home

The first major open battle of the Italian Wars took place on July 6, 1495 in Fornovo di Taro in the province of Parma in the region of Emilia-Romagna.  A French army took to the battlefield against combined troops from Venice, Milan, and Mantua. Soldiers were killed and wounded on both the French and the Italian sides, but the smaller French army claimed victory afterwards. However, it was also later celebrated as a victory against the French by Venice and Mantua.  After the battle, the French army were able to leave Italy safely, but they had to give up all the territory and valuables they had taken while they had been occupying the Italian peninsula.  It was just the start of a series of conflicts that were to take place in different parts of the peninsula between 1494 and 1559 between France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire, with various Italian states joining in on both sides.  Read more…

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Goffredo Mameli - writer

Young poet wrote the stirring words of Italian national anthem

Patriot and poet Goffredo Mameli died on this day in 1849 in Rome.  A follower of political revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini and a supporter of the Risorgimento movement, Mameli is the author of the words of the Italian national anthem, Fratelli d’Italia.  Mameli was the son of a Sardinian admiral and was born in Genoa in 1827 where his father was commanding the fleet of the Kingdom of Sardinia.  As he grew up he became interested in the theories of Mazzini and he joined a political movement that supported the idea of a united Italy.  Mameli was a 20-year-old student when he wrote the words that are still sung today by Italians as their national anthem.  They were sung to music for the first time in November 1847 to celebrate the visit of King Charles Albert of Sardinia to Genoa.  The anthem is known in Italian as L’inno di Mameli or Mameli’s hymn.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Cosa Nostra: The Definitive History of the Sicilian Mafia, by John Dickie

Recognised as the 'first truly definitive English-language study of this myth-laden subject' (Sunday Times), Cosa Nostra is the compelling story of the Sicilian Mafia, the world's most famous, most secretive and most misunderstood criminal fraternity.  The Mafia has been given many names since it was founded 140 years ago: the Sect, the Brotherhood, the Honoured Society, and now Cosa Nostra. Yet as times have changed, the Mafia's subtle and bloody methods have remained the same. Now, for the first time, Cosa Nostra reconstructs the complete history of the Sicilian mafia from its origins to the present day, from the lemon groves and sulphur mines of Sicily, to the streets of Manhattan.  Described by journalist and presenter Andrew Marr as 'Monumental and gripping', Cosa Nostra is a history rich in atmosphere with the narrative pace of the best detective fiction, and hailed by critics in Italy as one of the best books to be written about the Mafia.

John Dickie is Professor of Italian Studies at University College London (UCL). He is an internationally-recognised specialist on many aspects of Italian history and culture and his books have been translated into more than 20 languages. His history of Italian food, Delizia!, was turned into a six-part series for Italian television.

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