25 July

Mussolini removed from power

Dictator ousted and placed under arrest

The Fascist regime that had ruled Italy for 21 years was ousted on this day in 1943 when Benito Mussolini was arrested by King Victor Emmanuel III, hours after a meeting of the Grand Council of Fascism at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome had passed a vote of no confidence in their leader.  With most Italians desperate to see an end to their country’s participation in a world war in which defeat now looked certain, the Grand Council had been asked to vote on a motion proposed by Count Dino Grandi, a former Blackshirt who had become increasingly disillusioned with the self-styled Duce’s decision-making.  The motion, which Grandi prefaced by launching a scathing attack on his former ally’s leadership, was that the king would be asked to resume his full constitutional authority, effectively removing Mussolini from office.  Read more…

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Alfredo Casella – composer

Musician credited with reviving popularity of Vivaldi

Pianist and conductor Alfredo Casella, a prolific composer of early 20th century neoclassical music, was born on this day in 1883 in Turin.  Casella is credited as being the person responsible for the resurrection of Antonio Vivaldi’s work, following a 'Vivaldi Week' that he organised in 1939.  Casella was born into a musical family. His grandfather had been first cello in the San Carlo Theatre in Lisbon and he later became a soloist at the Royal Chapel in Turin.  His father, Carlo, and his brothers, Cesare and Gioacchino, were professional cellists. His mother, Maria, was a pianist and she gave the young Alfredo his first piano lessons. Their home was in Via Cavour, where it is marked with a plaque.  Casella entered the Conservatoire de Paris in 1896 to study piano under Louis Diemer and to study composition under Gabriel Fauré.  Read more…

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Battle of Molinella

First time artillery played a major part in warfare

An important battle in Italy’s history was fought on this day in 1467 at Molinella, near Bologna.  On one side were infantry and cavalry representing Venice and on the other side there was an army serving Florence.  It was the first battle in Italy in which artillery and firearms were used extensively, the main weapons being cannons fired by gunpowder that could launch heavy stone or metal balls.  The barrels were 10 to 12 feet in length and had to be cleaned following each discharge, a process that took up to two hours.  Leading the 14,000 soldiers fighting for Venice was the Bergamo condottiero Bartolomeo Colleoni. He was working jointly with Ercole I d’Este from Ferrara and noblemen from Pesaro and Forlì. Another condottiero, Federico da Montefeltro, led the army of 13,000 soldiers serving Florence in an alliance with Milan and Bologna. Read more…

Carlo Bergonzi – operatic tenor

Singer whose style was called the epitome of Italian vocal art

Carlo Bergonzi, one of the great Italian opera singers of the 20th century, died on this day in 2014 in Milan.  He specialised in singing roles from the operas of Giuseppe Verdi, helping to revive some of the composer’s lesser-known works.  Between the 1950s and 1980s he sang more than 300 times with the Metropolitan Opera of New York and the New York Times, in its obituary, described his voice as ‘an instrument of velvety beauty and nearly unrivalled subtlety’.  Bergonzi was born in Polesine Parmense near Parma in Emilia-Romagna in 1924. He claimed to have seen his first opera, Verdi’s Il trovatore, at the age of six.  He sang in his local church and soon began to appear in children’s roles in operas in Busseto, a town near where he lived.  He left school at the age of 11 and started to work in the same cheese factory as his father in Parma.  Read more…

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Agostino Steffani – composer

Baroque musician and cleric who features in modern literature

A priest and diplomat as well as a singer and composer, Agostino Steffani was born on this day in 1654 in Castelfranco Veneto near Venice.  Details of his life and works have recently been brought to the attention of readers of contemporary crime novels because they were used by the American novelist, Donna Leon, as background for her 2012 mystery The Jewels of Paradise.  Steffani was admitted as a chorister at St Mark’s Basilica in Venice while he was still young and in 1667 the beauty of his voice attracted the attention of Count Georg Ignaz von Tattenbach, who took him to Munich.  Ferdinand Maria, Elector of Bavaria, paid for Steffani’s education and granted him a salary, in return for his singing.  In 1673 Steffani was sent to study in Rome, where he composed six motets. The original manuscripts for these are now in a museum in Cambridge.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Mussolini's War: Fascist Italy from Triumph to Collapse, 1935-1943, by John Gooch

While staying closely aligned with Hitler, Mussolini remained carefully neutral until the summer of 1940. Then, with the wholly unexpected and sudden collapse of the French and British armies, Mussolini declared war on the Allies in the hope of making territorial gains in southern France and Africa. This decision proved a dreadful miscalculation, dooming Italy to its own prolonged and unwinnable war, immense casualties and an Allied invasion in 1943 which ushered in a terrible new era for the country.  John Gooch's book is the definitive account of Italy's war experience. Beginning with the invasion of Abyssinia and ending with Mussolini's arrest, Gooch brilliantly portrays the nightmare of a country with too small an industrial sector, too incompetent a leadership and too many fronts on which to fight.  Everywhere - whether in the USSR, the Western Desert or the Balkans - Italian troops found themselves against either better-equipped or more motivated enemies. The result was a war entirely at odds with the dreams of pre-war Italian planners. Mussolini's War shows the centrality of Italy to the war, outlining the brief rise and disastrous fall of the Italian military campaign.

John Gooch is one of the world's leading writers on Italy and the two world wars. His books include Mussolini and His Generals and The Italian Army and the First World War. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Leeds. 

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24 July

NEW - Benedetto Marcello – writer and musician

Controversial composer had little time for opera

Aristocratic poet and musician Benedetto Marcello, the author of a satirical and witty pamphlet that was reprinted many times and became an important source about the early history of opera, died on this day in 1739 in Brescia, then in the Republic of Venice.  Marcello is mainly remembered for his composition Estro poeticoarmonico, a setting for voices and instruments of the first 50 Psalms in the Bible. An edition with words in English was brought out in 1757, after his death.  In his amusing pamphlet Il teatro alla moda, which was written in 1720, Marcello expressed strong opinions about the state of musical drama at the time.  Born into a noble family in 1686 in Venice, he was intended by his father for the law.  Marcello became a member of the Venetian Council of Forty in 1711 and in 1730 he went to Pola in Istria as Governor, but he managed to combine his work with writing and composing music.  Read more…

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Victor Emmanuel of Sardinia

The first king to be called Victor Emmanuel

The King of Sardinia between 1802 and 1821, Victor Emmanuel I was born on this day in 1759 in the Royal Palace in Turin.  He was the second son of King Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia and was known from birth as the Duke of Aosta.  When the King died in 1796, Victor Emmanuel’s older brother succeeded as King Charles Emmanuel IV of Sardinia.  Within two years the royal family was forced to leave Turin because their territory in the north was occupied by French troops.  After his wife died, Charles Emmanuel abdicated the throne in favour of his brother, Victor Emmanuel, because he had no heir.  The Duke of Aosta became Victor Emmanuel I of Sardinia in June 1802 and ruled from Cagliari for the next 12 years until he was able to return to Turin.  During his reign he formed the Carabinieri, which is still one of the primary forces of law and order in Italy.  Read more…

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Eugene de Blaas - painter

Austro-Italian famous for Venetian beauties

Eugene de Blaas, a painter whose animated depictions of day-to-day life among ordinary Venetians - especially young Venetian women - were his most popular works, was born on this day in 1843 in Albano Laziale, just outside Rome.  Sometimes known as Eugenio Blaas, or Eugene von Blaas, he was of Austrian parentage. His father, Karl, also a painter, was a teacher at the Accademia di Belle Arti (Academy of Fine Arts) in Rome. His brother, Julius, likewise born in Albano, was also a painter.  In 1856, the family moved to Venice after his father was offered a similar position at the Venetian Academy. At that time, Venice attracted artists from all over Europe and the young De Blaas grew up in a social circle that was largely populated by painters and poets.  Like his father, he became interested in the school known as Academic Classicism, a style which seeks to adhere to the principles of Romanticism and Neoclassicism.  Read more…

Ermanno Olmi - film director

Won most prestigious awards at Cannes and Venice festivals

The film director Ermanno Olmi, who won both the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Venice Film Festival’s equivalent Golden Lion with two of his most memorable films, was born on this day in 1931 in the Lombardy city of Bergamo.  His 1978 film L'albero degli zoccoli - The Tree of Wooden Clogs - a story about Lombard peasant life in the 19th century that had echoes of postwar neorealism in the way it was shot, won the Palme d’Or - one of the most prestigious of film awards - at the Cannes Film Festival of the same year.  A decade later, Olmi won the Golden Lion, the top award at the Venice Film Festival, with La leggenda del santo bevitore - The Legend of the Holy Drinker - a story adapted from a novella by the Austrian author Joseph Roth about a homeless drunk in Paris, who is handed a 200-francs lifeline by a complete stranger and vows to find a way to pay it back.  Read more…

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Giuseppe Di Stefano – tenor

Singer from Sicily who made sweet music with Callas

The opera singer Giuseppe Di Stefano, whose beautiful voice led people to refer to him as ‘the true successor to Beniamino Gigli’, was born on this day in 1921 in Motta Sant’Anastasia, a town near Catania in Sicily.  Di Stefano also became known for his many performances and recordings with the soprano, Maria Callas, with whom he had a brief romance.  The only son of a Carabinieri officer, who later became a cobbler, and his dressmaker wife, Di Stefano was educated at a Jesuit seminary and for a short while contemplated becoming a priest.  But after serving in the Italian army he took singing lessons from the Swiss tenor, Hugues Cuenod. Di Stefano made his operatic debut in Reggio Emilia in 1946 when he was in his mid-20s, singing the role of Des Grieux in Massenet’s Manon. The following year he made his debut at La Scala in Milan in the same role.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Essays on Italian and Spanish Music of the Baroque, by David Whitwell

With the exception of the new form, Opera, the previous two centuries of musicology have tended to present the Baroque Period, 1600-1750, as a period of functional, even mechanical, music. The contemporary discussion in Essays on Italian and Spanish Music of the Baroque will help the reader understand that nothing could be further from the truth. The great interest of most musicians living in the Baroque Period was the role of emotion in music both in composition and in performance. The role of all idioms of performance, including especially improvisation, were directly associated with the goal of increased communication of emotion. We believe these pages will suggest to the reader that no player of the Baroque Period ever just played what he saw on paper, and we don't believe anyone should do so today.

David Whitwell has been a guest professor in one hundred different universities and conservatories throughout the United States and in 23 other countries. 

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Benedetto Marcello – writer and musician

Controversial composer had little time for opera

A 19th century bust of Marcello, 
housed in Palazzo Loredan in Venice

Aristocratic poet and musician Benedetto Marcello, the author of a satirical and witty pamphlet that was reprinted many times and became an important source about the early history of opera, died on this day in 1739 in Brescia, then in the Republic of Venice.

Marcello is mainly remembered for his composition Estro poeticoarmonico, a setting for voices and instruments of the first 50 Psalms in the Bible. An edition with words in English was brought out in 1757, after his death.

In his amusing pamphlet Il teatro alla moda, which was written in 1720, Marcello expressed strong opinions about the state of musical drama at the time.

Born into a noble family in 1686 in Venice, he was intended by his father for the law.  Marcello became a member of the Venetian Council of Forty in 1711 and in 1730 he went to Pola in Istria as Governor, but he managed to combine his work with writing and composing music. 

Eight years later, Marcello retired to Brescia as papal chamberlain. During his life he composed many operas, oratorios, cantatas, concertos and sonatas.

He was also a poet, translated John Dryden’s Timotheus as a text for one of his own cantatas, and wrote a libretto for the 1709 opera, Arata in Sparta, by Guido Ruggeri.

As a young man Marcello was a contemporary of Antonio Vivaldi in Venice and it is thought that his music has a flavour of Vivaldi’s work.

Although Marcello wrote an opera, La fede riconosciuta, which was produced in Vicenza in 1702, he had little sympathy with this form of music, as he showed when writing his pamphlet Il teatro alla moda.

The cover of Marcello's satirical
pamphlet, Il teatro alla moda

In 1728, Marcello married his singing student, Rosanna Scalfi, in a secret ceremony. As a nobleman, his marriage to a commoner was unlawful and after his death it was declared null by the state. Marcello died of tuberculosis while living in Brescia in 1739.  Rosanna was unable to inherit his estate and filed a suit in 1742 against Marcello’s brother Alessandro, asking for financial support.

The library of the Brussels Conservatoire possesses some interesting volumes of chamber cantatas composed by Marcello for his mistress.

The composer Joachim Raff wrote an opera entitled Benedetto Marcello, based loosely on the lives of Marcello and Rosanna Scalfi. 

The Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello di Venezia - also known as the Venice Conservatory - was named after him. The conservatory is housed in Palazzo Pisani a San Stefano, which faces Campo Santo Stefano in the San Marco sestiere.

A street in Rome, Largo Benedetto Marcello, is also named in his memory. 

Marcello's birthplace in Venice, in the Palazzo Marcello on the Grand Canal in the Cannaregio sestiere, is marked with a plaque.

The Palazzo Marcello on the Grand Canal
in Venice, Benedetto's birthplace

Travel tip:

Visitors to Venice who arrive by train at Santa Lucia railway station are greeted by the magnificent sight of the Grand Canal when they come out of the station. They can choose to sail down to Piazza San Marco in style on a vaporetto, or to walk down Lista di Spagna and through fascinating back streets in the direction of the Rialto bridge and Piazza San Marco. Walking through the Santa Croce area in the direction of the Rialto will bring you to the Campo della Pescheria and Venice’s famous fish market, which has been developed into a vibrant area with bars and restaurants where you can eat outside looking out over the Grand Canal. Venice’s most famous opera house is Teatro La Fenice in Campo San Fantin, inaugurated in 1792, but it is predated by the Teatro Goldoni, which originated as Teatro di San Luca, founded in 1622. La Fenice’s heyday was during the 19th century when the premieres of Rossini’s Tancredi and Semiramide and Verdi’s La traviata were held there. During the Austrian occupation of Venice,  the audience threw red, white and green flowers on the stage to represent the Italian flag and shouted ‘Viva Verdi’. They weren’t just praising the composer, Giuseppe Verdi, but using the letters of his last name as code for ‘Vittorio Emanuele Re d’Italia’, expressing support for the first King of Italy.  

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Brescia's 11th century Duomo Vecchio, also known
as La Rotonda because of its cylindrical shape

Travel tip:

Brescia, where Benedetto Marcello was residing when he died,  is a town of great artistic and architectural importance. Although it is the second city in Lombardy after the capoluogo, Milano, and has Roman remains and well-preserved Renaissance buildings, it is not as well-known to tourists as other historic Italian cities. Brescia became a Roman colony before the birth of Christ and remains from the forum, theatre and a temple can still be seen. The town was fought over by different rulers in the Middle Ages, but came under the protection of Venice in the 15th century. There is a distinct Venetian influence in the architecture of the Piazza della Loggia, an elegant square in the centre of the town, which has a clock tower similar to the one in Saint Mark’s square in Venice. Next to the 17th century Duomo is an older cathedral, the unusually shaped Duomo Vecchio, also known as la Rotonda, which is open to the public. The Santa Giulia Museo della Cittá covers more than 3000 years of Brescia’s history, housed within the Benedictine Nunnery of San Salvatore and Santa Giulia in Via Musei. The nunnery was built over a Roman residential quarter, but some of the houses, with their original mosaics and frescoes, have now been excavated and can be seen while you are looking round the museum.

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More reading:

Antonio Vivaldi, the musical priest who died impoverished

Tomaso Albinoni, the Vivaldi contemporary who became a prolific composer

Bartolomeo Cristofori, the 17th century musician credited with inventing the piano

Also on this day:

1759: The birth of Victor Emmanuel I of Sardinia

1843: The birth of painter Eugene de Blaas

1921: The birth of tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano

1931: The birth of film director Ermanno Olmi

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23 July

Francesco Cilea – opera composer

Calabrian remembered for beautiful aria Lamento di Federico 

Composer Francesco Cilea was born on this day in 1866 in Palmi near Reggio di Calabria.  He is particularly admired for two of his operas, L’arlesiana and Adriana Lecouvreur.  Cilea loved music from an early age. It is said that when he was just four years old he heard music from Vincenzo Bellini’s opera, Norma, and was moved by it.  When he became old enough, he was sent to study music in Naples and at the end of his course of study there he submitted an opera he had written, Gina, as part of his final examination. When this was performed for the first time it attracted the attention of a music publisher who arranged for it to be performed again.  Cilea was then commissioned to produce a three-act opera, meant to be along the lines of Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana, by the same publisher.  Read more… 

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Licia Albanese – soprano

Butterfly had a long career

Operatic soprano Licia Albanese, whose portrayal of Verdi and Puccini heroines delighted audiences all over the world, was born on this day in 1909 in Bari in the region of Puglia.  She made her operatic debut unexpectedly in 1934 at the Teatro Lirico in Milan during a performance of Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly. Albanese was understudying the title role and when the soprano became ill during Act One, she was hustled on to the stage to take over in Act Two.  She was a great success and during the next 40 years sang more than 300 performances in the role of Cio-Cio-San, the geisha who is better known as Madama Butterfly.  Her connection with the opera began early when she was studying with the singer, Giuseppina Baldassare-Tedeschi, who was a contemporary of  Puccini, and had been the greatest Butterfly of her day. Read more… 

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Zàini - Milan chocolate manufacturer

First factory opened in Via Carlo de Cristoforis

The Milan chocolate producer Zàini was founded on this day in 1913 when the company’s first factory opened in the Porta Garibaldi district of the city. The plant, opened by Luigi Zàini, a young entrepreneur, in Via Carlo de Cristoforis, was advertised as a ‘Factory of Chocolate, Cocoa, Candies, Jams and Similar’.   Zàini, who had experience in the confectionery business as an importer of biscuits, jams and other sweet products from northern Europe, had noted the rapidly growing popularity of chocolate and thought the time was right to move on from his role as middleman and become a producer in his own right.  In Milan at the time there were around 15 chocolate factories, so competition was keen, but Luigi had a unique selling point in mind. His dream was to be able to satisfy any wish for something sweet. Read more…

Damiano Damiani – screenwriter and director

Filmmaker behind the hit Mafia drama series La piovra

Damiano Damiani, who directed the famous Italian television series La piovra, which was about the Mafia and its involvement in Italian politics, was born on this day in 1922 in Pasiano di Pordenone in Friuli.  Damiani also made a number of Mafia-themed films and he was particularly acclaimed for his 1966 film, A Bullet for the General, starring Gian Maria Volontè, which came at the beginning of the golden age of Italian westerns.  Damiani studied at the Accademia di Brera in Milan and made his debut in 1947 with the documentary, La banda d’affari. After working as a screenwriter, he directed his first feature film, Il rossetto, in 1960.  His 1962 film, Arturo’s Island, won the Golden Shell at the San Sebastian International film festival.  During the 1960s, Damiani was praised by the critics and his films were box office successes.  Read more… 

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Sergio Mattarella – President of Italy

Anti-Mafia former Christian Democrat is Italy's 12th President

The first Sicilian to become President of Italy, Sergio Mattarella, was born on this day in 1941 in Palermo.  Mattarella, who has occupied the office since 2015, went into politics after the assassination of his brother, Piersanti, by the Mafia in 1980. His brother had been killed while holding the position of President of the Regional Government of Sicily.  Their father, Bernardo Mattarella, was an anti-Fascist, who with other prominent Catholic politicians helped found the Christian Democrat (Democrazia Cristiana) party. They dominated the Italian political scene for almost 50 years, with Bernardo serving as a minister several times. Piersanti Mattarella was also a Christian Democrat politician.  Sergio Mattarella graduated in Law from the Sapienza University of Rome and later started teaching parliamentary procedure at the University of Palermo. Read more… 

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Book of the Day: Italian Opera, by David Kimbell

Italy was the birthplace of opera. In this authoritative and accessible account, Italian Opera, David Kimbell introduces the composers and dramatists, the singers and audiences who, over three hundred years, have created not only a national tradition but the central tradition from which others have drawn their inspiration. He traces the history of Italian opera from its origins in the humanism of the Renaissance to Puccini in the early 20th century, drawing attention not only to musical issues but also to the social, literary, and philosophical ideas that have shaped modern Italian civilisation. Each part is illustrated by a detailed critical discussion of a key work.

David Kimbell is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh. His publications include Verdi in the Age of Italian Romanticism, Italian Opera, and Vincenzo Bellini: Norma.

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