25 March

Veronica Franco – courtesan and poet

The literary talent of a popular escort

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

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Arturo Toscanini - conductor

Cellist who became orchestra leader by chance

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

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Francesco I - Grand Duke of Tuscany

Florentine ruler at heart of Medici murder mystery

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

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Tina Anselmi - ground-breaking politician

Former partisan became Italy’s first female cabinet minister

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

Giambattista Marino – poet

The colourful life of an influential literary figure

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

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Mina - pop star

Italy’s all-time top selling female artist

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

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Saint Catherine of Siena

Pious woman from ordinary family helped the Pope reorganise the church

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

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

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

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

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24 March

Giorgio Gori - politician

Mayor who steered city of Bergamo through Covid nightmare

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

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Mimmo Jodice - photographer

Camera work with shades of metaphysical art

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

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Dario Fo – writer and actor

Prolific playwright put the spotlight on corruption

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

Luigi Einaudi - politician and winemaker

Composer's grandfather was President of the Republic

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

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Salvatore Viganò – dancer and choreographer

Ballet performer inspired Beethoven to compose music to suit his choreography

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

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Guido Menasci - poet, librettist and biographer

Respected writer and historian who found fame from an opera

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

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

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

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

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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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