14 October

Palma Giovane - painter

Mannerist took the mantle of Tintoretto 

The Venetian artist Jacopo Negretti, best known as Jacopo Palma il Giovane - Palma the Younger - or simply Palma Giovane, died in Venice on this day in 1628.  Essentially a painter of the Italian Mannerist school, Palma Giovane's style evolved over time and after the death of Tintoretto in 1594 he became the most revered artist in Venice.  He became in demand beyond Venice, too, particularly in Bergamo, the city in Lombardy that was a dominion of Venice, and in central Europe.  He received many commissions in Bergamo and was often employed in Prague by the Habsburg Emperor, Rudolph II, a noted art connoisseur.  Palma had been born into a family of painters. His great uncle, also called Jacopo, was the painter Palma Vecchio - Palma the Elder - while his father, Antonio Negretti, was a pupil of the elder Palma’s workshop manager, Bonifacio Veronese.  Read more…

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Learco Guerra - racing cyclist

“Human Locomotive” set record for most wins in one season

The racing cyclist Learco Guerra, who won the Giro d'Italia in 1934 and was world champion in 1931, was born on this day in 1902 in San Nicolò Po, a hamlet on the banks of the Po river in Lombardy, about 15km (9 miles) south of Mantua. He gained the nickname of "Human Locomotive" by the editor of Gazzetta dello Sport, organisers of the Giro d’Italia, for his ability to maintain high speeds over long periods.  Guerra’s single Giro d’Italia victory came in a year when he won 18 races, including 10 stages of the Giro d’Italia, the Giro di Lombardia and four rounds of the national championships. It was a record by an individual rider in a single season that would stand until the 1970s.  His fame was exploited by the Fascist government, which profited from his heroic status. Benito Mussolini praised his 'manly Italian virtues' of strength, stamina and determination.  Read more…

Alessandro Safina – singer

Tenor who has blended opera and rock

Alessandro Safina, a singer trained in opera who has expanded the so-called ‘crossover’ pop-opera genre to include rock influences, was born on this day in 1963 in Siena.  A household name in Italy, the tenor is less well known outside his own country but has recorded duets with international stars such as Sarah Brightman, South Korean soprano Sumi Jo, Rod Stewart, former Pretenders singer Chrissie Hynde, Scottish actor and singer Ewan McGregor and the superstar Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli.  Safina’s biggest album to date is Insieme a Te, which has sold more than 700,000 copies.  It was written in collaboration with the Italian pianist and composer Romano Musumarra, who helped realise Safina’s ambition of creating soulful rock-inspired music for the tenor voice.  He first performed songs from the album at the Olympia theatre in Paris in 1999.  Read more…

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Alesso Baldovinetti - painter

One of first to paint realistic landscapes

The early Renaissance painter Alesso Baldovinetti, whose great fresco of the Annunciation in the cloister of the Basilica of the Santissima Annunziata in Florence is still intact, was born on this day in 1425 in Florence.  Baldovinetti was among a group described as scientific realists and naturalists in art which included Andrea del Castagno, Paolo Uccello and Domenico Veneziano. Influenced by Uccello’s use of visual perspective, he had a particular eye for detail and his views of the Arno river in his Nativity and Madonna and Child are regarded as among Europe’s earliest paintings of accurately reproduced landscapes.  Veneziano’s influence is reflected in the pervasive light of his earliest surviving works, and he was also greatly influenced by Fra' Angelico. Historians believe that in the 1460s Baldovinetti was the finest painter in Florence. Read more…

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Book of the Day: The Painted Male in the Italian Renaissance: Sixteenth-Century Masterpieces from the Leinuo Zhang Collection, by Carlo Falciani

During the 16th century, the male portrait acquired a central role in Italian painting, becoming a privileged tool for representing power and individual identity. Posture, clothing, gestures and gaze are not simple aesthetic details, but visual signs through which authority and social status are expressed: the male body is no longer depicted as a mere physical presence, but as the visible expression of virtue, moral strength and inner balance. The male portrait is therefore not limited to representing an individual, but proposes a social and cultural model of masculinity, an identity that combines rationality and authority, power and a conscious self-presentation.  The Painted Male in Italian Renaissance presents and explores, through the insights of experts, eleven masterpieces of Italian Renaissance painting from the collection of Leinuo Zhang, a young Chinese collector with a passion for art. The works are absolute masterpieces by the great masters of the Italian Renaissance: Veronese, Moroni, Paris Bordon, Vasari, Ghirlandaio, Palma il Giovane, Allori, Scarsellino, Leandro Bassano, Giulio and Vincenzo Campi.  Organised by geographical area and painting schools (Florentine, Lombard, Venetian and Emilian), the volume features an by the editor Carlo Falciani and an introductory text by Elena Lazzarini. This is followed by technical entries of the works, compiled by the most authoritative scholars of the Italian Renaissance (from Marco Tanzi to Daniele Benati, from Carlo Falciani to Simone Facchinetti and Fabrizio Magani), accompanied by colour illustrations that allow the reader to appreciate the quality and beauty of these masterpieces in detail.  This title will be released on January 28, 2027.

Carlo Falciani teaches Art history, iconography, and iconology at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and is an independent curator. Elena Lazzarini is professor of modern and contemporary art history at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.

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13 October

Execution of former King of Naples

Joachim Murat, key aide of Napoleon, shot by firing squad

Joachim Murat, the French cavalry leader who was a key military strategist in Napoleon's rise to power in France and his subsequent creation of an empire in continental Europe, was executed on this day in 1815 in Pizzo in Calabria.  The charismatic Marshal was captured by Bourbon forces in the coastal town in Italy's deep south as he tried to gather support for an attempt to regain control of Naples, where he had been king until the fall of Napoleon saw the throne returned to the Bourbon king Ferdinand IV in May 1815.  Murat was held prisoner in the Castello di Pizzo before a tribunal found him guilty of insurrection and sentenced him to death by firing squad. The 48-year-old soldier from Lot in south-west France had been an important figure in the French Revolutionary Wars and gained recognition from Napoleon as one of his best generals. Read more…

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Piero Dusio - sportsman and entrepreneur

His Cisitalia company revolutionised automobile design

The footballer, racing driver and businessman Piero Dusio was born on this day in 1899 in Scurzolengo, a village in the hills above Asti, in Piedmont.  Dusio made his fortune in textiles but it is for his postwar venture into car production that he is most remembered. Dusio’s Cisitalia firm survived for less than 20 years before going bankrupt in the mid-1960s but in its short life produced a revolutionary car - the Cisitalia 202 - that was a gamechanger for the whole automobile industry.  Dusio played football for the Turin club Juventus, joining the club at 17 years old, and was there for seven years before a knee injury forced him to retire at the age of only 24, having made 15 appearances for the senior team, four of them in Serie A matches.  He kept his connection with the club and from 1942 to 1948 was Juventus president. Read more…

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Claudius - Roman emperor

Suspicious death of leader who conquered Britain

The Roman emperor Claudius, whose reign was notable among other things for turning Britain into a province of the Empire, died on this day in 54 AD.  It is a widely held view that he was poisoned on the orders of his scheming fourth wife, Julia Agrippina, the mother of his successor, Nero, in one of the power struggles that at the time were ever present.  It is thought he ingested some poisonous mushrooms that his taster, the eunuch Halotus, had assured him were safe to eat, either at an official banquet on the evening of October 12 or at his first meal of the following day.  When Claudius began to show signs of distress, one version of the story is that his physician, Xenophon, pushed a feather into his throat, ostensibly to make him vomit, but actually to ensure that he did not recover by administering more poison, with which he had coated the feather.  Read more…

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Giorgio Massari - architect

Work in 18th century Venice had echoes of Palladio

The architect Giorgio Massari, who designed a number of significant churches and palaces in Venice in the 18th century, was born on this day in 1687.  Massari’s legacy in Venice includes the imposing Palazzo Grassi on the Grand Canal and the church of Santa Maria del Rosario, commonly known as the Gesuati, on the Giudecca Canal, which is acknowledged as his masterpiece.  He redesigned Santa Maria della Visitazione - known as the Pietà - the church on the Riva degli Schiavoni famous for its association with the composer Antonio Vivaldi, who wrote some of his most famous music while working as a violin teacher at the adjoining orphanage.  His designs, especially his churches and villas, were often influenced by the work of the 16th century Classical architect Andrea Palladio and by Massari’s fellow Venetian, Baldassare Longhena. Read more…

Francesca Bertini - silent movie actress

Diva described as Italy’s first film star

The actress Francesca Bertini, one of the three so-called divas of Italy’s silent movie era, died on this day in 1985 in Rome at the age of 93. Between her screen debut in 1907 and her effective retirement in 1935, Bertini appeared in 139 titles. Her last appearance came in 1976, at the age of 84, when the director Bernardo Bertolucci persuaded her to accept a cameo in his epic historical drama, Novecento (1900).  Bertini, Lyda Borelli and Pina Menichelli were regarded as Italy’s three biggest female stars of the silent movie years and though Borelli came to be seen as the most talented of the three, there is no doubt that Bertini was a woman of outstanding ability. She has been described as Italy's first film star.  Her most famous film, Assunta Spina, a 1915 production, not only saw her take the title role but write scripts and direct many of the scenes. Read more…

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Eugenio Barsanti - engineer

Created world’s first working internal combustion engine

The engineer Eugenio Barsanti, whose internal combustion engine was the first working example of the technology to be produced anywhere in the world, was born on this day in 1821 in Pietrasanta, a town in northern Tuscany.   The Belgian-French engineer Étienne Lenoir and the German Nicolaus Otto are credited with the first commercially successful internal combustion engines, but Barsanti’s machine, which he developed with partner Felice Matteucci, was unveiled in 1853 - six years before Lenoir’s and eight years ahead of Otto’s.  Barsanti might have achieved commercial success himself but shortly after reaching an agreement with a company in Belgium to produce his machine on a commercial scale he contracted typhoid fever, from which he never recovered.  A rather sickly child, known by his parents as Nicolò, Barsanti took the name Father Eugenio. Read more…

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Mario Buda - anarchist

Prime suspect in Wall Street Bombing 

Mario Buda, the anarchist suspected but never convicted of the 1920 Wall Street bombing, was born on this day in 1884 in Savignano sul Rubicone, a town in the Emilia-Romagna region, about 90km (56 miles) southeast of Bologna.  Some 38 people were killed, with hundreds more injured, when a horse-drawn cart packed with explosives blew up close to the New York Stock Exchange building on the famous thoroughfare. Buda was identified by a blacksmith who had rented him the horse and Federal agents began an investigation.  The Italian, who had emigrated to the United States in 1907, was known to the police after being arrested previously in connection with a double-murder in the town of Braintree, Massachusetts. He had escaped from custody on that occasion and evaded detection again, boarding a ship to return to Italy before he could be questioned. Read more... 

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Book of the Day: Joachim Murat: Napoleon's Great Commander of Cavalry, by A. Hilliard Atteridge

Joachim Murat has come to epitomise the beau ideal cavalryman. Indeed, in the decades following the Napoleonic era, as a horse soldier excelled to extraordinary prominence, the name of Murat was often considered as analogous. In reality nobody could come close in stature and performance. Murat was one of many young men who saw the French Revolution as an opportunity to prosper in influence, power, status and wealth. An unabashed self-publicist, his gorgeous uniforms were singular and exceptional even in an age when the dandy in military uniform was the norm. His ambition was insatiable and in this was the root of his downfall, for he lacked the intelligence and moderation to consolidate his advantages. Yet, Murat rose to be a soldier of the highest rank, through marriage a member of Napoleon's own family, he was elevated to the aristocracy as Duke of Berg and in time crowned King of Naples. Though, like many of his calling, he was no military mastermind, Murat was a reliable lieutenant to Napoleon often achieving - through deeds of daring - far more than other senior officers could for their emperor. Above all there could be no doubt about the quality of Murat's personal courage. He led from the front and latterly rode into the fiercest melees armed only with a riding crop. Though he came from a different and lesser mould than his master Napoleon, Murat fatally shared his weakness for conceits and hubris and, as with Napoleon himself, poor judgment ended his career ignominiously before a firing squad of his former subjects. Atteridge's biography, first published in 1911, is a well regarded classic and is highly recommended. This Leonaur edition of Joachim Murat: Napoleon's Great Commander of Cavalry is newly typeset and not a facsimile.

Andrew Hilliard Atteridge was an Anglo-Irish journalist, war correspondent and author. 

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12 October

NEW - Vincenzo Monti - entrepreneur

Son of street vendor whose clothing brand became a household name

Vincenzo Monti, an entrepreneur whose Monti clothing became one of the biggest mass-market fashion brands in Italy in the 1960s, was born on this day in 1906 in Civitella del Tronto, a medieval hilltop town in the Abruzzo region.  At its peak, his company, Monti Confezioni d'Abruzzo, employed over 4,000 workers in three large factories, turning out 500,000 garments a year, supplying not just Italy, but exporting to the rest of Europe and the United States.  Monti opened their own flagship department stores - Grandi Magazzini Monti - as well as boutiques in Rome, L'Aquila, Chieti and Ascoli Piceno. Recognising a market for ready-to-wear fashion at affordable prices, and harnessing the power of TV advertising, Vincenzo turned the Monti brand into a household name.  It was a business phenomenon built on humble beginnings, Vincenzo taking over his father Attilio’s modest textile business in Civitella del Tronto at the age of just 15. Read more…

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Piero della Francesca - Renaissance painter

Mathematician famous for exploring perspective

Piero della Francesca, recognised as one of the greatest painters of the early Renaissance, died on this day in 1492 in what was then Borgo Santo Sepolcro, near Arezzo.  He was thought to have been around 77 years old and it has been popularly theorised that he was blind in the later years of his life, although evidence to support the claim is sketchy.  Della Francesca’s work was characterised by his exploration of perspective and geometric form, which was hardly surprising since in his own time he was as famous among his peers as a mathematician and geometer as well as an artist.  He came to be recognised in the 20th century as having made a major contribution to the Renaissance.  His fresco cycle The History – or Legend – of the True Cross in the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo, painted between 1452 and 1466, is among his best-known works. Read more…

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Bernardo Pisano – musician and priest

First composer to have collection of his music printed

Bernardo Pisano, who is believed to have been the first composer of the Italian madrigal, was born on this day in 1490 in Florence.  Pisano - sometimes known as Pagoli - was so important in musical circles during his lifetime that he is also thought to have been the first composer anywhere in the world to have a printed collection of secular music devoted entirely to himself.  Although he was born in Florence, it is supposed that, because he used the name Pisano, he must have also spent some time living in Pisa. As a young man, he sang and studied music at the Church of the Annunziata in Florence. In 1512, he became maestro di cappella there in addition to supervising the choristers and singing in the chapels himself. As a favourite of the Medici family, he was appointed to sing in the papal chapel in Rome in 1514 after Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici became Pope Leo X. Read more… 

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Ascanio Sobrero - chemist

Professor who discovered nitroglycerine

The chemist Ascanio Sobrero, who discovered the volatile compound that became known as nitroglycerine, was born on this day in 1812 in Casale Monferrato in Piedmont.  Nitroglycerine has a pharmaceutical use as a vasodilator, improving blood flow in the treatment of angina, but it is more widely known as the key ingredient in explosives such as dynamite and gelignite.  Its commercial potential was exploited not by Sobrero but by Alfred Nobel, the Swedish businessman and philanthropist who gave his name to the annually awarded Nobel Prizes.  Sobrero, aware of how much damage it could cause, had actually warned against nitroglycerine being used outside the laboratory.  Little is known about Sobrero’s early life, apart from his being born in Casale Monferrato, a town about 60km (37 miles) east of Turin.  Read more…

Luciano Pavarotti - tenor

Singer who became known as ‘King of the High Cs’

Luciano Pavarotti, one of the greatest operatic tenors of all time, was born on this day in 1935 in Modena in Emilia-Romagna.  Pavarotti made many stage appearances and recordings of arias from opera throughout his career. He also crossed over into popular music, gaining fame for the superb quality of his voice.  Towards the end of his career, as one of the legendary Three Tenors, he became  known to an even wider audience because of his concerts and television appearances.  Pavarotti began his professional career on stage in Italy in 1961 and gave his final performance, singing the Puccini aria, Nessun Dorma, at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin. He died the following year as a result of pancreatic cancer, aged 71.  The young Pavarotti had dreamt of becoming a goalkeeper for a football team.  Read more…

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Gillo Pontecorvo - film director

Most famous film was banned in France

The film director Gillo Pontecorvo, whose best known film, La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers) won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1966 and was nominated for three Academy Awards, died on this day in 2006 in Rome, aged 86.  A former journalist who had been an Italian Resistance volunteer and a member of the Italian Communist Party, Pontecorvo had been in declining health for some years, although he continued to make documentary films and commercials until shortly before his death.  Although it was made a decade or so after the peak years of the movement, La battaglia di Algeri is in the tradition of Italian neorealism, with newsreel style footage and mainly non-professional actors.  Pontecorvo also won acclaim for his 1960 film Kapò, set in a Second World War concentration camp. Read more… 

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Book of the Day: A New History of ‘Made in Italy’: Fashion and Textiles in Post-War Italy, by Lucia Savi

In the first book to examine the role played by textile manufacturing in the development of fashion in Italy, A New History of ‘Made in Italy’ investigates Italy’s transition from a country of dressmakers, tailors and small-scale couturiers in the early post-Second World War period to a major producer of ready-to-wear fashion in the 1980s. It takes the reader from Italy’s first internationally attended fashion show in 1951 to Time magazine’s Giorgio Armani April 1982 cover story, which signalled the fashion designer’s international arrival, and Milan’s presence as the capital of ready-to-wear.  Chapters focus on the material substance of Italian fashion – textile – looking at questions including the importance of manufacturing quality, design innovation, composition, production techniques, commerce and the role of textile on the country’s overall fashion system. Through these, Lucia Savi brings to light the importance of synthetic fibres, previously little-known players, such as the carnettisti (a type of textile wholesalers) as well as re-investigating well-known couturiers and designers such as Simonetta, Gianfranco Ferré and Gianni Versace. By looking at how things are made, by whom, and where, this book seeks to unpack the ‘Made in Italy’ label through a focus on making. Informed by extensive archival materials retrieved from a wide range of sources, it brings together the often-separated disciplines of fashion, textile and design history.

Lucia Savi is a curator at the Design Museum, London. In 2021 she curated the V&A exhibition Bags: Inside Out and authored its accompanying publication. She has a PhD from Kingston University, UK, on Italian fashion and textiles.

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Vincenzo Monti - entrepreneur

Son of street vendor whose clothing brand became a household name

The Monti logo as it appeared on 500,000 garments
a year produced at the company's peak in the '60s

Vincenzo Monti, an entrepreneur whose Monti clothing became one of the biggest mass-market fashion brands in Italy in the 1960s, was born on this day in 1906 in Civitella del Tronto, a medieval hilltop town in the Abruzzo region.

At its peak, his company, Monti Confezioni d'Abruzzo, employed over 4,000 workers in three large factories, turning out 500,000 garments a year, supplying not just Italy, but exporting to the rest of Europe and the United States.

Monti opened their own flagship department stores - Grandi Magazzini Monti - as well as boutiques in Rome, L'Aquila, Chieti and Ascoli Piceno. Recognising a market for ready-to-wear fashion at affordable prices, and harnessing the power of TV advertising, Vincenzo turned the Monti brand into a household name.

It was a business phenomenon built on humble beginnings, Vincenzo taking over his father Attilio’s modest textile business in Civitella del Tronto at the age of just 15.

Attilio sold rolls of fabric via street markets in Abruzzo and the neighbouring Marche region. In the Italian tradition, Vincenzo, an only child, was always destined to take over from his father in running the business but the moment he would do so was brought forward when his father suffered an accident and was forced to retire.

Despite his lack of education, having left school at 11, Vincenzo not only maintained the business but expanded it, investing in a truck as soon as he was old enough to drive and, after the family moved from Civitella to the coastal city of Pescara, transitioning from street vending to become a wholesale supplier at the age of just 24. It was not long afterwards that he opened a shop, selling fabrics directly to the public.

Vincenzo Monti took over his father's 
textile business at the age of 15

Both his wholesale and retail premises were badly damaged during World War Two, when Pescara’s strategic position made it a major target for Allied bombing raids.

Yet the conflict ultimately became the turning point for Vincenzo’s business as money was pumped into Italy’s post-war regeneration. 

He had already decided that selling fabrics had its limitations and believed that increasingly fashion-conscious Italian customers were ready to move away from buying clothes from old-fashioned tailors and embrace ready-to-wear.

Using funding provided by the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno - a government initiative aimed at developing Southern Italy - Vincenzo founded Monti srl in 1950 and opened his first factory manufacturing finished garments in  Pescara the following year, providing employment, in the offices and on the shop floor, for 200 people.

Within three years, with sales going well, he had built a much bigger, state-of-the-art manufacturing plant in Roseto degli Abruzzi, just along the coast from Pescara, employing another 300 people, and officially launched Monti Confezioni Spa.

His ambition, though, was to grow bigger still. To that end, he travelled to the United States to study American mass-production factories. On returning to Italy, he completely modernised his clothing production. 

Monti’s factories were soon equipped with mainframe computers from Olivetti to automatically calculate and process garment patterns. This dramatically reduced production times and slashed costs, allowing the company to sell high-quality garments at a fraction of the price compared with traditional tailors.

Monti Confezioni's headquarters in the Porta Nuova
area of Pescara now houses offices and apartments

In tandem with this technological upgrade, Vincenzo launched a major marketing initiative. He understood that the increasingly popular vehicle of television was the ultimate way to reach the Italian public and invested heavily in an advertising campaign via Carosello, a popular evening light entertainment show on Italian television. 

Monti Confezioni commercials were shown several times during the show and it was not long before viewers could recite the company’s slogans without even seeing the ads. ‘Monti: abiti belli, abiti pronti’  - Monti: beautiful clothes, ready-to-wear clothes - became part of the shopper’s vocabulary.

The company cemented its 1960s dominance by adding storefronts to its assembly lines in the form of its Grandi Magazzini Monti department stores and a chain of brand-exclusive retail boutiques across major cities, including Rome.  In Pescara, two of the city’s best-known tailors - Mariani and Tritapepe - were effectively put out of business by Monti’s success. 

In 1969, in nearby Montesilvano, Vincenzo built a new plant, which began operations in 1970 employing 2,000 workers, producing for the most part high-quality men's jackets and coats.

Perhaps what marked Vincenzo Monti as a successful businessman was that, as well as having an eye for an opportunity, he knew when the time was right to walk away. By 1974, only four years after the Montesilvano plant had gone online, he had sold the business to ENI, the state-owned oil company that was diversifying into textiles.

There were a number of factors. Increasingly hostile relations between employers and the trade unions in the late 1960s led to strikes and demonstrations that badly affected production, forcing the company to lay off 500 workers.

At the same time, the landscape of Italian fashion began to shift away from industrial mass production to high-end designers, such as Armani and Versace. As labels began to acquire as much importance as the garment itself, manufacturers such Monti began to be seen as somewhat downmarket. 

Vincenzo, whose wife, Domenica, gave him two sons, Orlando and Attilio, and a daughter, Olga, stepped away from the clothes business, becoming president of the Banca Popolare di Teramo e Città Sant'Angelo, based in Teramo - about 20km (12 miles) from his birthplace in Civitella del Tronto.

He used his personal wealth in charitable projects in his later years, including a substantial contribution in cash and clothing to help the victims of the 1980 Irpinia earthquake. He died in February, 1981, at the age of 74.

The skyline of Civitella del Tronto is dominated
by the massive 16th century fortress

Travel tip:

Civitella del Tronto, where Vincenzo Monti was born, is an historic hilltop town in the province of Teramo, in Abruzzo region, about 25km (16 miles) inland from the Adriatic coast and a similar distance southeast of the city of Ascoli Piceno. Perched dramatically on a travertine cliff at an altitude of 590m (1,936ft) above sea level, within the Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga National Park, it has a well preserved medieval centre and is officially listed among I Borghi più belli d'Italia (The Most Beautiful Villages of Italy).  The town is dominated by the huge Fortezza di Civitella del Tronto, which is the largest fortress in Italy and the second largest in Europe, occupying 25,000msq and stretching for 500m. It was built in the 16th century by King Philip II of Spain over an existing medieval castle, sitting on the border between the Kingdom of Naples and the Papal States. It was famously the last bastion of the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to surrender to the Piedmontese forces during the Unification of Italy, put under siege but not capitulating until March 20, 1861 - three days after the official proclamation of the unified Kingdom of Italy. The fortress, which houses a museum of historical weapons, offers spectacular views from its ramparts. In the village, a maze of alleys between stone-built houses, look out for La Ruetta, which is recognised as one of the narrowest streets in Italy, barely wide enough for a single person to squeeze along.

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Pescara Vecchia, the city's historic quarter, draws
visitors to its bars, restaurants and nightlife

Travel tip:

Pescara, where Vincenzo Monti built his business, is a city of almost 120,000 people on the Adriatic in the Abruzzo region. It is known for its 10 miles of clean, sandy beaches, yet is only 50km (31 miles) from the Gran Sasso mountain range, the snow-capped peaks of which are visible even from the coast on a clear winter’s day. The city is the birthplace of the poet, patriot and military leader, Gabriele D’Annunzio. His childhood home, the Casa Natale di Gabriele D’Annunzio, which can be found in the historic centre of the city on the south side of the Fiume Pescara, which bisects the city, houses a museum about his life and works. The Museo delle Genti d'Abruzzo has exhibitions on regional industries like ceramics and olive oil. Pieces by Miró and Picasso are on view at the Vittoria Colonna Museum of Modern Art. The city’s old quarter, known as Pescara Vecchia, has become a bustling hub of nightlife with wine bars and restaurants lining Corso Manthonè, the menus of many of which feature the local arrosticini - charcoal-grilled mutton skewers. Being by the sea, many fish and seafood dishes are also on offer. The city straddles the Pescara river, which can be crossed near its mouth by the Ponte del Mare, a cable-supported cycle and pedestrian bridge which, at 466m (1,529ft), is the longest such bridge in Italy and one of the longest in Europe. It was built, in part, to facilitate the continuity of the Adriatic Cycle Route, which stretches from Trieste in the north all the way down to Santa Maria di Leuca at the southernmost tip of Puglia, a distance of around 1,000 miles (1,600km).

Pescara accommodation by Hotels.com

More reading:

How Luciano Benetton turned a family clothing company into a worldwide success story

Nino Cerruti, the budding journalist who became a fashion giant

Why designer Roberto Capucci rejected ready-to-wear

Also on this day:

1490: The birth of musician and priest Bernardo Pisano

1492: The death of Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca

1812: The birth of chemist Ascanio Sobrero

1935: The birth of tenor Luciano Pavarotti

2006: The death of film director Gillo Pontecorvo

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