1 May

Giovanni Guareschi – writer

Satirical magazine editor first used Don Camillo to fill a gap

Author Giovanni Guareschi, the creator of the fictional character, Don Camillo, was born on this day in 1908 in Roccabianca in Emilia-Romagna.  The popular stories featuring his famous comic creations, the stalwart Italian priest, Don Camillo, and the Communist mayor, Peppone, have since been made into many radio and television programmes and films.  Guareschi, who was christened Giovannino, started his career writing for the Gazzetta di Parma and then became a magazine editor.  He was called up to serve in the army in 1943 but was quickly taken prisoner, along with other Italian soldiers, by the Germans. He wrote a secret diary while he was in the prison camp, Diario Clandestino.  After the war Guareschi founded a weekly satirical magazine, Candido, where his Don Camillo stories first appeared.  Read more…

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Ignazio Silone – politician and author

Socialist leader became famous for anti-Fascist novels

Writer and political leader Ignazio Silone was born Secondino Tranquilli on this day in 1900 in Pescina dei Marsi in the region of Abruzzo.  Tranquilli became famous under the pseudonym, Ignazio Silone, during World War II for his powerful anti-Fascist novels and he was nominated for the Nobel prize for literature ten times.  Silone’s father, Paolo Tranquilli, died when he was 11 and he lost his mother, Marianna, and other members of his family four years later in the Avezzano earthquake of 1915.  Two years afterwards he joined the Young Socialist group of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), eventually becoming their leader and editor of their newspaper Avanguardia.  He was a founding member of the breakaway Italian Communist Party (PCI) party in 1921 and became one of its covert leaders during the Fascist regime, editing their newspaper in Trieste, Il Lavoratore. Read more…

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The Portella della Ginestra Massacre

Conspiracy theories behind murder of peasants

Sicily and the whole of Italy was horrified on this day in 1947 when gunmen opened fire on defenceless peasants gathered for a Labour Day celebration in the hills above Palermo, killing 11 and wounding more than 30 in what became known as the Portella della Ginestra Massacre.  The victims included four children between the ages of seven and 15, who were cut down indiscriminately by a gang of men, some on horseback, who appeared suddenly and began firing machine guns as the peasants, numbering several hundred, congregated on a plain along a remote mountain pass between the towns of Piana degli Albanesi and San Giuseppe Jato, where a Labour Day rally had taken place every year since 1893.  Salvatore Giuliano, an outlaw wanted in connection with the killing of a police officer in 1943, was held responsible.  Read more…

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Laura Betti - actress and jazz singer

Long-time companion of director Pier Paolo Pasolini

The actress and singer Laura Betti, who appeared in a number of important Italian films in the 1960s and 1970s, including Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Novecento and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema, was born on this day in 1927 in Casalecchio di Reno, in Emilia-Romagna.  In addition to Teorema, which won her the coveted Volpi Cup for best actress at the 1968 Venice Film Festival, Betti appeared in six other Pasolini films as the two developed a special and unlikely relationship.  Betti, a vivacious blonde with striking good looks, had no shortage of suitors among the authors, artists, singers and aspiring actors that made up her circle in Rome in the 1950s, but Pasolini was gay and had no interest in her in a romantic sense.  Yet he became a regular guest at her apartment near the Palazzo Farnese.  Read more…

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Uberto Pasolini - film producer and director

Roman count who found unexpected fame with The Full Monty

The film director and producer Uberto Pasolini, who gained international recognition when his British comedy The Full Monty became one of UK cinema’s biggest commercial success stories in 1997, was born on this day in 1957 in Rome.  A nephew of the great Italian director Luchino Visconti, Pasolini worked for 12 years as an investment banker in England before following his dream to work in the film industry, abandoning his career to work, initially without pay, on the set of the David Puttnam-Roland Joffé film, The Killing Fields, in Thailand.  Puttnam took him on, at first as a location scout, before Pasolini moved to America to become part of Puttnam’s production team in Los Angeles. He set up his own company in London in 1994 and went on to direct some of his own productions, including the critically acclaimed 2008 movie Machan. Read more…

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Book of the Day: The Little World of Don Camillo, by Giovanni Guareschi

In Don Camillo's Little World, where the Cold War is fought on the very doorstep of life, the hot-headed Catholic priest and the equally pugnacious Communist mayor, Peppone, confront one another in riotous and often hilarious manner.  But when Don Camillo unburdens himself in the village church a voice from the cross above the high altar responds and his conversations with Il Cristo begin. We watch and listen, as with fascinating insights and gentle humour the prejudices of the stubborn priest are undermined, a resolution to conflict emerges, and the situation is transformed to the benefit of the community.  It is then that we see that the ideas and values of Don Camillo's Little World are true for all times, the world over… In this brand new, authorised edition of Giovanni Guareschi's enchanting classic, 19 stories never before translated into English are published for the first time. Set in an isolated village amidst the sultry beauty of Italy’s Po Valley, The Little World of Don Camillo has been enjoyed by countless folk from 10 to 100, not only in book form, but also on film, TV and radio.

Giovannino Guareschi, known as Giovanni to his millions of English language readers, was born at Fontanelle in the Valley of the Po on the 1st of May, 1908.  He wrote 347 stories featuring Don Camillo, a character who has done for Italy what Cervantes' Don Quixote did for Spain.

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30 April

Antonio Sant’Elia - architectural visionary

Futurist’s ideas were decades ahead of his time

The architect Antonio Sant’Elia, best known for producing hundreds of drawings based on his vision of an idealised modern industrial city, was born on this day in 1888 in Como in Lombardy.  Sant’Elia’s life was short - he died in battle barely a year after signing up for military service in the First World War - and his physical legacy comprised only one completed building, a modest villa in the hills above his home city.  Yet, thanks to the boldly imaginative designs he captured in dozens of sketches illustrating how he saw the cities of the future, Sant’Elia is still seen as one of modern architecture’s most influential figures, more than a century after his death.  A builder by trade, in 1912 Sant’Elia set up a design office in Milan with fellow architect Mario Chittone.  He was already a follower of Futurism, the avant-garde artistic, social and political movement that had been launched by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909.  Read more…

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Andrea Dandolo - Doge of Venice

Reign tested by earthquake, plague and war

Andrea Dandolo, the fourth member of a patrician Venetian family to serve as Doge of the historic Republic, was born on this day in 1306.  A notably erudite scholar, Dandolo wrote two chronicles of the history of Venice in Latin and reformed the Venetian legal code by bringing together all of the diverse laws applicable to the Venetian Republic within one legal framework.  He achieved these things despite his reign being marked by a devastating earthquake, a catastrophic outbreak of the Black Death plague and two expensive wars, against Hungary and then Genoa.  Dandolo studied at the University of Padua, where he became a professor of law, a position he maintained until he was elected Doge. He quickly rose to a position of prominence in Venetian life, being appointed Procurator of St Mark’s Basilica, the second most prestigious position in the Venetian hierarchy after the Doge, at the age of just 25.  Read more…

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Francesco Primaticcio - painter, sculptor and architect

Italian who had major influence on French art 

The Mannerist painter, architect and sculptor Francesco Primaticcio, who played an important role in shaping the artistic landscape of France during the 16th century, was born on this day in 1504 in Bologna.  Primaticcio spent almost two thirds of his life in France, where he rose to be superintendent of works at the Château de Fontainebleau, the former medieval castle that was turned into an opulent Renaissance-style palace by Francis I of France.  Primaticcio trained as an artist in Bologna under Innocenzo da Imola before moving to Mantua to study with Giulio Romano, a former pupil of Raphael whose style helped define Mannerism.  He assisted Romano in his work on the decorations of the Palazzo del Te in Mantua, a project that refined his skills in fresco painting and architectural ornamentation.  Read more…

Luigi Russolo – painter and composer

Futurist artist who invented 'noise music'

Luigi Russolo, who is regarded as the first ‘noise music’ composer, was born on this day in 1885 in Portogruaro in the Veneto.  Russolo originally chose to become a painter and went to live in Milan where he met and was influenced by other artists in the Futurist movement.  Along with other leading figures in the movement, such as Carlo Carrà, he signed both the Manifesto of Futurist Painters and the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting as the artists set out how they saw Futurism being represented on canvas, and afterwards participated in Futurist art exhibitions.  Russolo issued his own manifesto, L’arte dei rumori - The Art of Noises - in 1913, which he expanded into book form in 1916.  He stated that the industrial revolution had given modern man a greater capacity to appreciate more complex sounds. Read more…

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Pope Pius V - Saint

Pontiff dismissed jester and clamped down on heretics

The feast day of Pope Saint Pius V is celebrated every year on this day, the day before the anniversary of his death in 1572 in Rome.  Pius V, who became Pope in 1566, is remembered chiefly for his role in the Counter Reformation, the period of Catholic resurgence following the Protestant Reformation.  He excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I of England for heresy and for persecuting English Catholics and he formed the Holy League, an alliance of Catholic states against the Turks.  Pius V was born Antonio Ghislieri in Bosco, now Bosco Marengo, in Piedmont. At the age of 14 he entered the Dominican Order, taking the name of Michele. He was ordained at Genoa in 1528 and then sent to Pavia to lecture.  He became a bishop under Pope Pius IV but after opposing the pontiff was dismissed. After the death of Pius IV, Ghislieri was elected Pope Pius V in 1566. Read more…

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Book of the Day: Futurism: A Very Short Introduction, by Ara Merjian

From the motorcar to the radio, modern technology radically transformed urban life by the first decade of the 20th century. As one of Western Europe's least industrialized countries, Italy appeared impervious to such developments. It was this state of affairs at which the Futurist movement took aim. With its founding in 1909, the poet and impresario Filippo Tommaso Marinetti called for a revitalization of aesthetic expression by means of "movement and aggression."  A growing cadre of Futurist painters, poets, authors, and musicians exchanged Italy's cultural patrimony for new technologies, media, and metaphors, championing machine-propelled speed and its salutary hazards. Cubist painting, collage, and sculpture lent the Futurist campaign a revolutionary style to match its rhetorical fervor. Yet whereas Cubism remained a revolution of artistic form, Futurism sought to shatter the boundaries between art and life itself.  Indeed, the movement's challenge to 20th-century culture lay not in any specific set of images or objects, but a more comprehensive revolution of sensibility. Futurism: A Very Short Introduction explains how, from its base in Milan, Futurist activity spread throughout the entire peninsula. Prefiguring and then propagandizing Fascist imperialism, Futurism also galvanized a range of progressive modernist phenomena. More than a century later, the “activist model” of the Futurist avant-garde remains deeply fraught in its historical implications.

Ara H Merjian is Professor of Italian Studies at New York University, where he is an affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History. He has written and edited several books.

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29 April

NEW - Vittorio Vanzo – conductor

Versatile musician was inspired by the operas of Wagner

Vittorio Maria Vanzo, who was passionate about the music of Wagner and introduced many of his works to Italian audiences, was born on this day in 1862 in Padua.  Vanzo toured both Italy and abroad as a piano accompanist and conductor and he also composed music himself.  His mother was from a noble family in Padua and his father was a doctor in literature and mathematics. Encouraged by his mother, Vanzo studied piano technique under the pianist and composer Melchiorre Balbi. He then went to the Conservatory in Milan, where he studied counterpoint with Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti and composition with Antonio Bazzini.  After graduating in 1881, he became a piano accompanist in the school for singing headed by the baritone Felice Varesi, and he later performed in concerts throughout Italy and in other countries.  Read more…

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Liberation of Fornovo di Taro

How Brazilian soldiers hastened Nazi capitulation

The town of Fornovo di Taro in Emilia-Romagna acquired a significant place in Italian military history for a second time on this day in 1945 when it was liberated from Nazi occupation by soldiers from the Brazilian Expeditionary Force fighting with the Allies.  Under the command of General João Baptista Mascarenhas de Morais, the Brazilians marched into Fornovo, which is situated about 13km (8 miles) south-west of Parma on the east bank of the Taro river, at the conclusion of the four-day Battle of Collecchio.  It was in Fornovo that the 148th Infantry Division of the German army under the leadership of General Otto Fretter-Pico offered their surrender, along with soldiers from the 90th Panzergrenadier Division and the 1st Bersaglieri and 4th Mountain Divisions of the Fascist National Republican Army.  In total, 14,779 German and Italian troops laid down their arms. Read more…

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Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini - painter

Venetian artist who made mark in England

The painter Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, who is regarded as one of the most important Venetian painters of the early 18th century, was born on this day in 1675 in Venice.   He played a major part in the spread of the Venetian style of large-scale decorative painting in northern Europe, working in Austria, England, France, Germany, and the Netherlands.  With a style that had influences of Renaissance artist Paolo Veronese and the Baroque painters Pietro da Cortona and Luca Giordano, he is considered an important predecessor of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo in the development of Venetian art.  A pupil of the Milanese painter Paolo Pagani, Pellegrini began travelling while still a teenager, accompanying Pagano to Moravia and Vienna.  After a period studying in Rome, he returned to Venice and married Angela Carriera, the sister of the portraitist Rosalba Carriera. Read more…

Sara Errani - tennis champion

Five-times Grand Slam doubles winner reached No 5 in singles

Tennis star Sara Errani, who was born in Bologna on this day in 1987, is one of the most successful Italian tennis players of all time.  She and former partner Roberta Vinci's career record of five Grand Slam doubles titles is unparalleled.  No other Italian combination has won more than one Grand Slam title.  Errani won her sixth Grand Slam title at the US Open in 2024, winning the mixed doubles with an Italian partner in Andrea Vavassori. In the same year, Errani and her new women's doubles partner, Jasmine Paolini, were runners-up in the French Open but returned to the Roland Garros clay courts two months later to win the women's doubles gold medal at the Paris Olympics.  Nicola Pietrangeli, who was ranked the No 3 men's singles player at his peak, won the French Open championship in 1959 and 1960 and was runner-up in Paris on two other occasions. Read more…

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Rafael Sabatini – writer

Author of swashbucklers had the ‘gift of laughter’

Rafael Sabatini, who wrote successful adventure novels that were later made into plays and films, was born on this day in 1875 in Iesi, a small town in the province of Ancona in Le Marche.  Sabatini was the author of the international bestsellers, Scaramouche and Captain Blood, and afterwards became respected as a great writer of swashbucklers with a prolific output.  He was the son of an English mother, Anna Trafford, and an Italian father, Vincenzo Sabatini, who were both opera singers.  At a young age he was exposed to different languages because he spent time with his grandfather in England and also attended school in both Portugal and Switzerland, while his parents were on tour.  By the time Sabatini went to live in England permanently, at the age of 17, he was already proficient in several languages.  Read more…

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Book of the Day: Richard Wagner: The Sorcerer of Bayreuth, by Barry Millington

Richard Wagner is both one of the most influential and most polarising composers in the history of music. Over the course of his long career, he produced a stream of spellbinding works that challenged musical convention through their richness and tonal experimentation, ultimately paving the way for modernism. The Sorcerer of Bayreuth presents an in-depth but easy-to-read overview of Wagner’s life, work and times. Making use of the very latest scholarship much of it undertaken by the author himself in connection with his editorship of The Wagner Journal, Millington reassesses received notions about Wagner and his work, demolishing ill-informed opinion in favour of proper critical understanding. It is a radical and occasionally controversial reappraisal of this most perplexing of composers. The book considers a whole range of themes, including the composer's original sources of inspiration; his fetish for exotic silks; his relationship with his wife, Cosima, and with his mistress, Mathilde Wesendonck; his anti-semitism; the operas’ proto-cinematic nature; and the turbulent legacy both of the Bayreuth Festival and of Wagnerism itself. 

Barry Millington is chief music critic for the London Evening Standard and the editor of The Wagner Journal. He has written and edited, or co-edited, seven books on Wagner, including The Wagner Compendium and The Ring of the Nibelungen: A Companion. 

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Vittorio Vanzo – conductor

Versatile musician was inspired by the operas of Wagner

Vanzo was a composer and pianist but
became best known as a conductor

Vittorio Maria Vanzo, who was passionate about the music of Wagner and introduced many of his works to Italian audiences, was born on this day in 1862 in Padua.

Vanzo toured both Italy and abroad as a piano accompanist and conductor and he also composed music himself.

His mother was from a noble family in Padua and his father was a doctor in literature and mathematics. Encouraged by his mother, Vanzo studied piano technique under the pianist and composer Melchiorre Balbi. He then went to the Conservatory of Milan, where he studied counterpoint with Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti and composition with Antonio Bazzini.

After graduating in 1881, he became a piano accompanist in the school for singing headed by the baritone Felice Varesi, and he later performed in concerts throughout Italy and in other countries.

Vanzo is perhaps best known as a conductor and interpreter of the music of the German composer, Wilhelm Richard Wagner. He had become interested in Wagner’s music while studying at the Milan Conservatory and in order to further his studies of the works of the composer, he went to Bayreuth in northern Bavaria in 1883. 

There he was able to listen to the music performed in the composer’s own theatre, the Teatro del Festival.  Wagner lived in Bayreuth for the last 11 years of his life.

In the same year, Vanzo directed a production of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, which was first staged in Parma on Christmas Day.

In 1891, he married the Norwegian soprano, Anna Kriebel, who he had met while he was conducting, and she was performing, at Teatro alla Scala in Milan. 

She took part in Wagner’s Lohengrin and Tanhauser, and Vanzo also went on to be her piano accompanist when she performed in Lieder concerts. 

The Teatro del Festival in Bayreuth, where Vanzo
travelled to listen to Wagner's music

Later that year, he conducted the first Italian performance of Wagner’s opera, La Valchiria (The Valkyrie) at the Teatro Regio in Turin, and in 1893 he revived the opera for the Teatro Comunale in Trieste. 

Vanzo also conducted Giacomo Puccini’s Edgar at the Teatro Giglio in Lucca and at the Teatro Regio in Turin.  In 1894 he conducted the orchestra of the Teatro Verdi in his home town of Padua during a run of performances of the opera, Edgar. 

During his career, Vanzo conducted operas by the Italian composers Catalani, Boito, Leoncavallo, Pergolesi, and many others.

He met the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg in Norway in 1897. Grieg had heard his interpretations for orchestra and piano, and later said he had been impressed with the technical skill and virtuosity of the conductor and composer.

In 1906, Vanzo abandoned his conducting career to devote himself to composition. He composed music for voice with piano accompaniment, chamber music, a sonata for piano and mandolin, and an opera, whose score was never published. He also opened an opera singing school in Milan.

Vanzo had three children with Anna Kriebel, who died in Milan in 1926, where the conductor and composer also died in 1945. 

Padua's Scrovegni Chapel, home to the beautiful
frescoes painted by the Florentine artist Giotto

Travel tip:

Padua, known in Italian as Padova, where Vittorio Vanzo was born, is well known as the city of Sant’Antonio (St Anthony), and is also one of the most important centres for art in Italy, and home to the country’s second oldest university. The enormous Basilica del Santo was built in the 13th century to preserve the mortal remains of Sant’Antonio, a Franciscan monk who became famous for his miracles. The church attracts pilgrims from all over the world and is rich with works of art by masters such as Titian and Tiepolo. Padova has become acknowledged as the birthplace of modern art because it is home to the Scrovegni Chapel, the inside of which is covered with frescoes by Giotto, the artist who was the first to paint people with realistic facial expressions showing different emotions. His scenes depicting the lives of Mary and Joseph, painted between 1303 and 1305, are one of the world’s most important works of art. At Palazzo Bo, Padova’s university founded in 1222, you can still see the original lectern where Galileo held his lessons. The Teatro Verdi, where Vanzo conducted the orchestra for a run of an opera in 1894, is a beautiful 18th century theatre named after the composer Giuseppe Verdi. It is located in Via del Livello in the centre of the city, close to Piazza dei Signori.

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The Conservatorio di Milano, which is now named
after the composer Giuseppe Verdi  

Travel tip:

Milan’s Conservatory of Music (Conservatorio di Musica ‘Giuseppe Verdi’), where Vanzo studied music, is in Via Conservatorio, just off Via Pietro Mascagni, behind the Duomo and a short walk from Teatro alla Scala. It was established by a royal decree of 1807, when Milan was capital of the so-called Kingdom of Italy, under the rule of Napoleon at that time. The Conservatory of Music opened the following year with premises in the cloisters of the Baroque church of Santa Maria della Passione in Via Conservatorio. It became the largest institute of musical education in Italy and its past students also include Giacomo Puccini, Amilcare Ponchielli, Arrigo Boito, Pietro Mascagni, Riccardo Muti and Ludovico Einaudi. Ironically, Giuseppe Verdi, after whom the conservatory is now named, was turned down when he applied to study there in 1832.

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More reading:

The bricklayer who became Italy’s greatest Wagnerian tenor

Errico Petrella, the Sicilian composer scorned by Wagner

How Felice Varesi became the Verdi’s first Macbeth

Also on this day:

1675: The birth of painter painter Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini

1875: The birth of writer Rafael Sabatini

1945: The liberation of Fornovo di Taro

1987: The birth of tennis star Sara Errani

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