23 March

NEW - Enrico Alberto d'Albertis - naval officer and yachtsman

Navigator recreated Colombus’s Atlantic voyage

Enrico Alberto d’Albertis, an intrepid sailor who circumnavigated the globe at least three times during his lifetime, was born on this day in 1846 in Voltri, a former fishing village now a district of Genoa.  In his time, d’Albertis was a navigator, writer, ethnologist, philologist, yachtsman, and philanthropist. He served in the Royal Italian Navy and commanded merchant vessels, but is best remembered for recreating Christopher Columbus’s Atlantic route using self‑built historical instruments and for founding Italy’s first yacht club.  He also built a home in the style of a castle, the Castello d’Albertis, an example of the Gothic Revival architectural movement, on the Monte Galletto hill, offering sweeping views over the Gulf of Genoa. He left the castle to the city.  As well as d’Albertis’s own living quarters, the castle now houses the Museo delle Culture del Mondo. Read more…

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Ugo Tognazzi - comic actor

Achieved international fame through La Cage aux Folles

Ugo Tognazzi, the actor who achieved international fame in the film La Cage aux Folles, was born on this day in 1922 in Cremona.  Renowned for his wide repertoire in portraying comic characters, Tognazzi made more than 62 films and worked with many of Italy's top directors.  Along with Vittorio Gassman, Alberto Sordi and Nino Manfredi, Tognazzi was regarded as one of the four top stars of commedia all'italiana - comedy the Italian way - in the 1960s and 1970s.  In 1981 he won the award for best actor at the Cannes International Film Festival for his role in Bernardo Bertolucci's Tragedia di un Uomo Ridicolo (The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man).  His work was widely acclaimed in Italy, but it was not until he was cast in the role of homosexual cabaret owner Renato Baldi in the French director Édouard Molinaro's 1979 movie La Cage Aux Folles that he became known outside Italy.   Read more…

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Franco Battiato – singer-songwriter

Long career of a musical philosopher

One of the most popular singer-songwriters in Italy, Franco Battiato, was born on this day in 1945 in Ionia in Sicily.  Nicknamed Il Maestro, Battiato has written many songs with philosophical and religious themes. He has also had a long-lasting professional relationship with Italian singer Alice, with whom he represented Italy at the 1984 Eurovision Song Contest.  Battiato graduated from high school at the Liceo Scientifico Archimede in Acireale, a city in the province of Catania in Sicily.  He went to Rome and then moved on to Milan, where he won his first musical contract. After his first single, La Torre, was released, Battiato performed the song on television. After some success with the romantic song E l’amore, he released the science fiction single La convenzione, which was judged to be one of the finest Italian progressive rock songs of the 1970s.  Read more…

The founding of the Italian Fascists

Mussolini launched party at 1919 Milan rally

Italy's notorious future dictator Benito Mussolini officially formed what would become known as the National Fascist Party on this day in 1919 at a rally in Milan's Piazza San Sepolcro.  A war veteran and former socialist activist who had moved towards a more nationalist political stance, Mussolini initially drew his followers together as the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italian Combat Group).  This group evolved into the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) two years later, sweeping to power in 1922 when King Victor Emmanuel III, fearing civil war after thousands of Mussolini's supporters, the Blackshirts, marched on Rome, asked Mussolini to form a government.  Born the son of a blacksmith in Predappio, in Emilia-Romagna, Mussolini had been an active socialist, first in Switzerland, where he had moved as a 19-year-old to seek work and avoid military service, and again when he returned to Italy.  Read more…

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Lorenzino de’ Medici - assassin

Mystery over motive for killing cousin

Lorenzino de’ Medici, who became famous for the assassination of his cousin, the Florentine ruler Alessandro de’ Medici, was born on this day in 1514 in Florence.  The killing took place on the evening of January 6, 1537.  The two young men - Alessandro was just four years older - were ostensibly friends and Lorenzino was easily able to lure Alessandro to his apartments in Florence on the promise of a night of passion with a woman who had agreed to meet him there.  Lorenzino, sometimes known as Lorenzaccio, left him alone, promising to return with the woman in question, at which point Alessandro dismissed his entourage and waited in the apartments.  When Lorenzino did return, however, it was not with a female companion but with his servant, Piero, and the two attacked Alessandro with swords and daggers. Read more…

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Book of the Day: Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504, by Laurence Bergreen

He knew nothing of celestial navigation or of the existence of the Pacific Ocean. He was a self-promoting and ambitious entrepreneur. His maps were a hybrid of fantasy and delusion. When he did make land, he enslaved the populace he found, encouraged genocide, and polluted relations between peoples. He ended his career in near lunacy.  But Columbus had one asset that made all the difference, an inborn sense of the sea, of wind and weather, and of selecting the optimal course to get from A to B. Laurence Bergreen's energetic and bracing book gives the whole Columbus and most importantly, the whole of his career, not just the highlight of 1492. Columbus undertook three more voyages between 1494 and 1504, each designed to demonstrate that he could sail to China within a matter of weeks and convert those he found there to Christianity. By their conclusion, Columbus was broken in body and spirit, a hero undone by the tragic flaw of pride. If the first voyage illustrates the rewards of exploration, Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 shows how the subsequent voyages illustrate the costs - political, moral, and economic.

Laurence Bergreen is the author of several biographies. These include: Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life, Capone: The Man and the Era and As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin. He is also the author of Voyage to Mars: NASA's Search for Life Beyond Earth.

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Enrico Alberto d’Albertis - naval officer and yachtsman

Navigator recreated Colombus’s Atlantic voyage

Enrico Alberto d'Albertis spent his
whole life sailing the globe

Enrico Alberto d’Albertis, an intrepid sailor who circumnavigated the globe at least three times during his lifetime, was born on this day in 1846 in Voltri, a former fishing village now a district of Genoa.

In his time, d’Albertis was a navigator, writer, ethnologist, philologist, yachtsman, and philanthropist. He served in the Royal Italian Navy and commanded merchant vessels, but is best remembered for recreating Christopher Columbus’s Atlantic route using self‑built historical instruments and for founding Italy’s first yacht club. 

He also built a home in the style of a castle, the Castello d’Albertis, an example of the Gothic Revival architectural movement, on the Monte Galletto hill, offering sweeping views over the Gulf of Genoa. He left the castle to the city.

As well as d’Albertis’s own living quarters, the castle now houses the Museo delle Culture del Mondo, which contains ethnographic and archaeological collections assembled by Captain d'Albertis during his travels in Africa, the Americas, and Oceania, as well as nautical collections and photographs, volumes from his library, hundreds of drawings for the construction of the neo-Gothic complex, and a substantial assembly of sundials, for which he had a lifetime’s fascination.

Born into a family who were successful in the textile industry, Enrico was educated at the Collegio “Carlo Alberto” in Moncalieri, near Turin, then entered the Collegio di Marina di Genova.

He made his first circumnavigation of the world as a naval cadet, aboard the Principe Umberto.  His route included the North Sea, Baltic, Egypt, and the Canary Islands as part of a full itinerary that saw him cross the Atlantic and Pacific oceans - an experience that shaped his lifelong interest in navigation, ethnology, and maritime instruments.

Commissioned as guardiamarina (ensign) in 1866, he fought in the Battle of Lissa during the Third Italian War of Independence, before serving on the battleships Ancona and Formidabile. In 1869, he witnessed the inauguration of the Suez Canal.

After being promoted to first-class midshipman, he left the navy for the merchant navy. Following several voyages in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea as mate aboard the Emma D, on which he also sailed to England in 1871, he was given command of the Emilia, a sailing vessel equipped with an auxiliary engine.

The Castello d'Albertis, the neo-Gothic villa-castle
d'Albertis built for himself on a hill above Genoa

The Emilia became the lead ship of the first Italian convoy to transit the Suez Canal en route to the Indies.

From 1874, D’Albertis dedicated himself to yachting. In 1879, he co‑founded the first Italian Yacht Club, a major institutional milestone in Italian maritime culture.

In 1891, he organised the voyage that made him famous in the world of navigators. The year before the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America by Cristoforo Colombo; d'Albertis set sail in a specially built yacht - the Corsaro - and with it retraced Columbus's course. 

After 27 days at sea, navigating with the same equipment used by his great predecessor, he reached the coasts of San Salvador. He sailed on from the Caribbean island to New York, where he was officially greeted by the US authorities in recognition of his achievement.

The journey back to the old continent was not as comfortable for d'Albertis as had been the one going. Returning on one of the four school ships of the Naval Academy of Livorno that were at anchor in the bay of San Lorenzo, d’Albertis ran into a storm that caused waves ten metres high off the island of Terranova. It was only after several days of violently pitching seas that he managed to get out of the storm.

Some of the instruments used by
d'Albertis in his Columbus voyage

Between 1895 and 1896 he made his second or perhaps third voyage around the world. Although he never published any accounts of these journeys, their itineraries have been reconstructed thanks to the text of unpublished manuscripts, which show that between October 1877 and October 1878 he visited Ceylon, India, Burma, Singapore, Borneo, New Guinea, Australia, Sumatra, Japan, the United States, and Panama, before travelling to South Africa, Tasmania, New Zealand, Polynesia, California, Mexico, and Cuba between 1895 and 1896. 

Further to these voyages, at the end of 1910 he visited Egypt, Ceylon, Australia, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil.

In between, he had travelled to Tripolitania, Algeria, Tunisia, Eritrea and Benadir in Somalia, as well as several times also to Egypt and Sudan, taking part in excavations while in Egypt. In 1906 he sailed to East Africa, Harrar, Uganda and Lake Victoria , while in 1908 he circumnavigated the entire African continent. 

When Italy entered World War One, d’Albertis volunteered to work in the Tyrrhenian Sea. He was awarded the War Merit Cross by the Ministry of the Navy for his work in the surveillance of enemy submarines

He spent the last years of his life in Genoa, in the castle he built atop Monte Galletto, which he transformed into a museum. In retirement, he devoted himself to the construction of sundials, which had always been a hobby he enthusiastically embraced. Between 1875 and 1928, he built around a hundred, many of which can be seen in the museum today.

D'Albertis died on the evening of March 3, 1932, leaving his castle to the municipality of Genoa.

The Sanctuary of Nostra Signora di Acquasanta,
which contains a number of important artworks
 

Travel tip:

The area around Voltri, where d’Albertis was born, has been inhabited since prehistoric times. It probably took its name from the Ligures tribe of the Veituri. In the Middle Ages it was a hamlet in the Republic of Genoa and a centre for the production of paper.  In 1796 Voltri was the site of a battle between the French troops of Napoléon Bonaparte and the allied forces of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont. After the fall of the First French Empire, it became an autonomous commune in the Sardinian territories, a status it kept until 1926, when the Mussolini’s Fascist government made it part of the wider Genoa area. It sits about 17km (10 miles) west of the centre of Genoa. It is now a quartiere of the city, part of the VII Municipio.  Notable sights include the Sanctuary of Nostra Signora di Acquasanta, the Villa Duchessa di Galliera and the parish churches of Sant’Ambrogio and Santi Nicolò ed Erasmo.

The headquarters of the Yacht Club Italiano, which
still plays a major part in the Italian yachting world 

Travel tip:

The Yacht Club Italiano, which Enrico d’Albertis co-founded in 1879 with Vittorio Augusto Vecchi, a naval officer, with the support of King Umberto I, is today based at the Porticciolo Duca degli Abruzzi in the Carignano area of Genoa, about 1.5km (1 mile) east of the city centre. The club is a thriving organisation, putting on prestigious events on the yachting calendar, including the Rolex Giraglia, Genova Sailing Week, and the Millevele. The club also provides sailing education through its Scuola di Mare Beppe Croce, founded in 2000. Croce was president of the club for 28 years, D’Albertis is remembered in a prize, the d'Albertis Trophy, which the club awards for significant sailing feats. Originally founded as the Regio Yacht Club Italiano, the club organised its first regatta in August, 1880, in the Gulf of La Spezia, featuring 177 boats. Following the fall of the Italian monarchy, the club was re-founded in 1946 as the Yacht Club Italiano.

More reading:

Amerigo Vespucci, the Medici clerk who discovered a new world

The four-year epic journey of Alessandro Malaspina 

Andrea Doria, the brilliant naval commander who freed Genoa from foreign domination

Also on this day:

1514: The birth of Lorenzino de’ Medici

1919: The founding of the Italian Fascists

1922: The birth of comic actor Ugo Tognazzi

1945: The birth of singer-songwriter Franco Battiato

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22 March

'La Castiglione' – model and secret agent

Beautiful woman helped the cause of Italian unification

Virginia Oldoini, who became known as La Castiglione, was born on this day in 1837 in Florence.  She became the mistress of the Emperor Napoleon III of France and also made an important contribution to the early development of photography.  She was born Virginia Oldoini to parents who were part of the Tuscan nobility, but originally came from La Spezia in Liguria. At the age of 17 she married the Count of Castiglione, who was 12 years older than her, and they had one son, Giorgio.  Her cousin was Camillo, Count of Cavour, who was the prime minister to Victor Emmanuel II, the King of Sardinia, later to become the first King of a united Italy.  When the Countess travelled with her husband to Paris in 1855, Cavour asked her to plead the cause of Italian unity with Napoleon III.  Considered to be the most beautiful woman of her day, she became Napoleon III’s mistress. Read more…

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Nino Manfredi - actor and director

Totò fan became maestro of commedia all’italiana

The actor and director Saturnino ‘Nino’ Manfredi, who would become known as the last great actor of the commedia all’italiana genre, was born on this day in 1921 in Castro dei Volsci, near Frosinone in Lazio.  Manfredi made more than 100 movies, often playing marginalised working-class figures in the bittersweet comedies that characterised the genre, which frequently tackled important social issues and poked irreverent fun at some of the more absurd aspects of Italian life, in particular the suffocating influence of the church.  He was a favourite of directors such as Dino Risi, Luigi Comencini, Ettore Scola and Franco Brusati, who directed him in the award-winning Pane and cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate), which evoked the tragicomic existence of immigrant workers and was considered one of his finest performances.  Read more…

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Michele Sindona - fraudster and killer

Failed banker ordered murder of investigating lawyer

The shadowy banker Michele Sindona, who had links to underworld figures in Italy and America as well as prominent politicians, died in hospital in the Lombardy town of Voghera, 70km (43 miles) south of Milan, on this day in 1986.  His death, attributed to cyanide poisoning, came four days after he had been sentenced to life imprisonment for ordering the killing of a lawyer investigating the collapse of his $450 million financial empire.  His own lawyer claimed Sindona had been murdered but although it was never established beyond doubt, the circumstances of his death, caused by drinking coffee laced with the poison at breakfast in Voghera's maximum-security prison, pointed towards suicide.  Sindona’s chequered career also saw him sentenced to 25 years' jail in America for fraud following the failure of the Franklin National Bank on Long Island. Read more…

Lea Pericoli - tennis player

Star remembered for on-court fashion as much as tournament success

The tennis player Lea Pericoli, who won 30 tournaments on the international circuit between 1953 and 1972, was born in Milan on this day in 1935.  Pericoli, who continued playing until the age of 40, also won 27 titles at the Italian national championships, a record that still stands today.  She never progressed beyond the last 16 in singles at three three Grand Slam tournaments in which she participated but was a semi-finalist twice in women’s and mixed doubles at the French Open in Paris, playing on the red clay surface which most suited her game.  Yet she achieved fame beyond mere results after joining up with the British player-turned-fashion designer Teddy Tinling, whose extravagantly decorated designs, decorated with lacy frills, sometimes feathers and even mink, she would often be the first to wear on court. Read more…

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Vittorio Emanuele II Monument - Rome landmark

‘Altar of the Fatherland’ built to honour unified Italy’s first king

The foundation stone of Rome’s huge Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II was laid on this day in 1885 in the presence of his son and successor Umberto I and his family.  The monument, which took half a century to complete fully, occupies a site on the northern slope of the Capitoline (Campidoglio) Hill on the south-eastern side of the modern city centre, a few steps from the ruins of the Forum, the heart of ancient Rome.  Built in white Botticino marble, the multi-tiered monument is 135m (443 ft) wide, 130m (427 ft) deep, and 70m (230 ft) high, rising to 81m (266ft) including the two statues of a chariot-mounted winged goddess Victoria on the summit of the two propylaea.  Its appearance has earned it various nicknames, ranging from the ‘wedding cake’ to the ‘typewriter’, although it is officially known as Vittoriano or Altare della Patria.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Profiles in Power: Cavour, by Harry Hearder

The process of Italian unification cannot be understood without an understanding of the remarkable career and personality of the man who was perhaps its chief protagonist, Count Camillo di Cavour.  Born in Turin in 1810, Cavour abandoned an early military career because of his uncomfortable liberal opinions, to concentrate initially on restoring his family estates. After travels in France and England, he was drawn increasingly into the politics of his native Piedmont - then a backward and insignificant state, still reeling from comprehensive military defeat by Austria, the major occupying power of northern Italy. In 1852 he became its prime minister.  Under Cavour's astute direction, Piedmont began to play an active role in European power politics, rapidly building up alliances and obligations, particularly with France and Britain, which were to stand her in vital stead when the struggle with Austria erupted again in 1859. The defeat of Austria (with French arms) and the acquiescence of the European Great Powers allowed the longstanding dream of a pan-Italian state to become a reality. In the year of his death (1861), less than a decade after he became prime minister in Turin, Cavour had become the first prime minister of the newly-united Kingdom of Italy, with Piedmont as its nucleus.

Harry Hearder was a professor of history at the University of Wales in Cardiff. He published widely on European and Italian history. 

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21 March

AC Milan pay record fee for Ruud Gullit

Signing of Dutch star sparked new era of success

A new golden era in the history of the AC Milan football club effectively began on this day in 1987 when the club agreed a world record transfer fee of £6 million - the equivalent of about £14.5 million (€16.8 million) today - to sign the attacking midfielder Ruud Gullit from the Dutch champions PSV Eindhoven.  The captain of The Netherlands national team that would be crowned European champions the following year, Gullit was regarded as one of the world’s best players at the time and his arrival in Milan caused huge excitement.  Thousands of Milan supporters turned out to greet him on the day he arrived in the city, so many that the car taking him from the airport to the club’s headquarters needed a police escort with sirens blaring in order to forge a path through the crowds.  Those fans correctly sensed that Gullit’s signing would bring a change of fortunes for the rossoneri after a dark period in their history.  Read more…

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Benedetta Cambiagio Frassinello – educator

Nun who promoted the rights of girls to a quality education

The Feast Day of Saint Benedetta Cambiagio Frassinello, who founded the Benedictine Sisters of Providence, is celebrated on this day, the anniversary of her death in 1858.  Benedetta carried out pioneering work by rescuing poor and abandoned girls and promoting their rights to a good education. She was made a saint by Pope John Paul II in 2002.  Benedetta was born in 1791 in Genoa but her family later moved to Pavia. As a young girl she wanted to consecrate her life to God, but obeying her parents’ wishes, she married Giovanni Battista Frassinello when she was 24.  After two years of marriage, during which they had no children, they decided to live a celibate life and stay together as brother and sister. They both later joined religious orders but Benedetta was forced to leave and return to live in Pavia again because of ill health.  Read more…

Alberto Marvelli - Rimini's Good Samaritan

Heroic deeds helped victims of bombing raids

Alberto Marvelli, who came to be seen as a modern day Good Samaritan after risking his life repeatedly to help the victims of devastating air raids in the Second World War, was born on this day in 1918 in Ferrara.  He died in 1946 at the age of only 28 when he was struck by a truck while riding his bicycle but in his short life identified himself to many as a true hero.  He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2004.  Marvelli's acts of heroism occurred mainly in Rimini, his adopted hometown, which suffered heavy bombing from the Allies due to its proximity to the Gothic or Green Line, a wide belt of German defensive fortifications that ran across the whole peninsula from La Spezia to the Adriatic coast.  As well as giving aid and comfort to the wounded and dying and to those whose homes and possessions had been destroyed, Marvelli also rescued many Rimini citizens from trains destined for concentration camps.  Read more…

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Angela Merici – Saint

Nun dedicated her life to educating girls

Angela Merici, who founded the monastic Ursuline Order, was born on this day in 1474 in Desenzano del Garda, then part of the republic of Venice.  The Ursulines are the oldest order of women in the Roman Catholic Church dedicated to teaching and were the first to work outside a convent in the community.  Merici was orphaned at the age of 15 and sent to Salò to live in the home of an uncle, where she became deeply religious and joined the Third Order of Saint Francis.  She returned to Desenzano after the death of her uncle when she was 20 and found that many of the young girls in her home town received no education and had no hope of a better future.  Merici gathered together a group of girls to teach the catechism to the young children.  Then, in 1506, while praying in the fields, she had a vision that she would found a society of virgins in the town of Brescia.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Veni, Vidi, Vici: When Italian Football Ruled Europe, by Dominic Hougham

A celebration of the late 1980s and 90s, when Italian football dominated Europe, Veni, Vidi, Vici is a must-read for anyone who experienced Italian football through Channel 4’s groundbreaking 1990s coverage. It was an era when ten different Italian teams played in major European finals, when the greatest players strutted their stuff in Italy’s stadiums, cheered on by colourful fans with flares and tifos. Among topics the book discusses are the effect the Heysel disaster had on European football, including Italian football’s relative weakness before Heysel; the turbulent times of Diego Maradona at Napoli, including his and Italy’s experiences at Italia ’90; the influx of foreign talent into Italian football, including the Dutch trio as part of Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan revolution and three Germans at Inter; the dominance of Italian clubs in Europe, including the likes of Sampdoria, Torino, Roma, Fiorentina, Lazio and Parma alongside Napoli, Milan, Inter and Juventus; the record of English imports into Italy, with a chapter dedicated to Paul Gascoigne’s adventure at Lazio and Channel 4 coverage; Italy’s amazing journey through the USA ’94 World Cup, including Baggio’s ups and downs; plus the end of Italian dominance and the fall of several clubs.  This evocative book will take those who remember the era on a nostalgic journey to a time when Italian football was the ultimate in cool.

Dominic Hougham is the author of Fifty Great World Cup Matches... and Why You Should Watch Them! and a full-time contributor to These Football Times magazine. 

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