Showing posts with label 1881. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1881. Show all posts

27 January 2020

Frank Nitti - mobster

Barber who became Al Capone’s henchman


Frank Nitti grew up in the Capone family's  neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York
Frank Nitti grew up in the Capone family's
neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York
The mobster who achieved notoriety as Frank Nitti was born Francesco Raffaele Nitto it is thought on this day in 1881, although some accounts put the year of his birth as 1886. 

Nitti, who was raised in Brooklyn, New York, where he and Al Capone - his cousin - grew up, would eventually become Capone’s most trusted henchman in the Chicago mob he controlled.  After Capone was jailed for 11 years for tax evasion, Nitti was ostensibly in charge of operations.

Unlike many of the American Mafia bosses in the early part of the 20th century, Nitti was not a Sicilian.  His roots were in the heart of Camorra territory in the shadow of Vesuvius, his birthplace the town of Angri, 8km (5 miles) from nearby Pompei.  Angri was also the hometown of Capone’s parents.

Young Francesco’s father died when he still a small child. His mother, Rosina, married again within a year to Francesco Dolengo, who emigrated to the United States in 1890.  Nitti, his mother and his sister, Giovannina, left Italy to join him in 1893, settling in Navy Street, Brooklyn.

He was enrolled in a local school but left at around age 13, taking a job as a pinsetter in a bowling alley before becoming a barber. By this time he was well acquainted with criminal activities through the Navy Street Gang, of which a number of Capone’s brothers were members.  He is said to have left home after falling out with his step-father.

Nitti worked for many years as the chief henchman to Chicago boss Capone
Nitti worked for many years as the chief
henchman to Chicago boss Capone
The story of Nitti’s early adulthood is not clear but at some stage, possibly in 1913, he left Brooklyn and next surfaced in Chicago, again working as a barber, supplementing his income through crime after meeting mobsters Alex Louis Greenberg and Dion O'Banion. He kept a low profile but marriage records show that at some point he moved to Dallas, Texas, where he married his first wife, Rosa, in 1917.  Accounts suggest he became involved with a Galveston crime syndicate but fled back to Chicago after stealing a large amount of money from two associates.

Nitti renewed contacts with Greenberg and O’Banion and supported himself as a jewel thief, liquor smuggler and fence. Through his smuggling activities, Nitti came into contact with Chicago crime boss Johnny "Papa Johnny" Torrio and his lieutenant, Al Capone, who had been sent to assist Torrio by New York mobster Frankie Yale.

Capone, several years younger than Nitti, took over after Torrio survived an assassination attempt.  Thanks to their family connections, Capone saw Nitti as someone he could trust and placed him in charge of his growing smuggling and distribution operation. With prohibition in place, Nitti imported whisky from Canada and sold it through a network of so-called speakeasies around Chicago.

His stock remained sufficiently high that when Capone was briefly imprisoned in 1929 he ran the organisation. He acquired the nickname “The Enforcer” but is thought to have shied away from violence himself, preferring to leave the dirty work to others.

In 1931, by then married for a second time to Anna after his first marriage ended in divorce, Nitti was sent to jail along with his boss on tax evasion charges.  But where Nitti’s sentence was for 18 months, Capone was sent away for 11 years. It meant that Nitti was again in charge of the Chicago underworld.

Fearful of going to jail, Nitti killed himself in  a railway yard close to his home in 1943
Fearful of going to jail, Nitti killed himself in
a railway yard close to his home in 1943
As the boss, Nitti’s position was not as strong as it appeared.  Under his command, the upcoming Paul "The Waiter" Ricca became increasingly powerful, to the extent that when the New York mobsters Charles "Lucky" Luciano and Meyer Lansky set about organising the National Crime Syndicate to co-ordinate mob activity across the United States, they dealt directly with Ricca, rather than Nitti.

An attempt to remove Nitti was revealed in the aftermath of a police raid on his office by a team of Chicago police, headed by detectives Harry Lang and Harry Miller, during which Lang shot Nitti three times in the back and neck. He claimed he was acting in self defence and Nitti, who survived, was charged with attempted murder. During the trial, however. Miller testified that Lang had been given $15,000 to kill Nitti.

The end for Nitti came in 1943, when he and other leading figures in the so-called Chicago Outfit, including Ricca, were indicted on charges of extorting money from Hollywood movie studios, including Columbia Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, RKO Pictures and 20th Century Fox, with the threat that they would face problems from the unions if they did not comply.

Having discovered during his first confinement that he suffered from severe claustrophobia, Nitti dreaded the idea of going to jail again, yet he was under pressure from Ricca to go before the grand jury and shoulder the blame himself rather than allow the Outfit to be broken up.

The day before his scheduled appearance, Nitti took his own life. He waited for his latest wife, Annette, to leave their home in the Chicago suburb of Riverside for church before downing several large drinks and walking five blocks to a railway yard, where he first tried to throw himself in front of a moving train but could not go through with it, and then, at the third attempt, shot himself in the head.

Nitti is buried at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hillside, another urban village, about 24km (15 miles) west of downtown Chicago. His grave can be found left of the main gain, to the right pf which is the family plot containing the grave of Capone. The cemetery contains the graves of several other Chicago mobsters.         

The Castello Doria in Angri is an unusual structure with two concentric towers, built by the Doria family
The Castello Doria in Angri is an unusual structure with
two concentric towers, built by the Doria family
Travel tip:

Nitti’s hometown of Angri, situated where the urban sprawl that fans out around Vesuvius meets the Lattari mountains at the beginning of the Sorrentine Peninsula, is rich in history. It was the scene of the battle marked the victory of the Eastern Roman Empire over the Goths in 552 and became an important town under Bourbon rule and in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the 19th century.  The Castello Doria, notable for its two concentric towers, is an example of the town’s rich architectural heritage, dating back to the period between the 17th and 18th centuries in which Angri was controlled by the Doria family of Genova.


The impressive Pontifical Shrine of the Blessed  Virgin of the Rosary of Pompei
The impressive Pontifical Shrine of the Blessed
 Virgin of the Rosary of Pompei
Travel tip:

A few kilometres from Angri in the direction of the Bay of Naples is Pompei, the town about 25km (15 miles) south of Naples built close to the ruins of the former Roman city. Like Angri, it is not without impressive achitecture, notably the Pontifical Shrine of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary of Pompei, its towering cathedral. The cathedral was built from a dilapidated former church by Bartolo Longo, a lawyer who had returned to the Christian faith after a period following alternative beliefs, over a 28-year period between 1873 and 1901. The statue of the Virgin of the Rosary that sits atop the façade was carved from a single block of Carrara marble by Gaetano Chiaromonte.




More reading:

Frankie Yale: gang boss who employed the young Al Capone

How Lucky Luciano brought order to warring clans

The real life 'Godfather' - Carlo Gambino

Also on this day:

98AD: The Roman Emperor Trajan begins his reign

1901: The death of composer Giuseppe Verdi

1927: The birth of writer Giovanni Arpino

1962: The birth of composer Roberto Paci Dalò


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15 September 2018

Ettore Bugatti - car designer

Name that became a trademark for luxury and high performance


Ettore Bugatti launched the company in 1909 after attending the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan
Ettore Bugatti launched the company in 1909 after
attending the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan
The car designer and manufacturer Ettore Bugatti was born in Milan on this day in 1881.

The company Bugatti launched in 1909 became associated with luxury and exclusivity while also enjoying considerable success in motor racing.  When the glamorous Principality of Monaco launched its famous Grand Prix in 1929, the inaugural race was won by a Bugatti.

Although Bugatti cars were manufactured for the most part in a factory in Alsace, on the border of France and Germany, their stylish designs reflected the company’s Italian heritage and Bugatti cars are seen as part of Italy’s traditional success in producing desirable high-performance cars.

The story of Bugatti as a purely family business ended in 1956, and the company closed altogether in 1963.  The name did not die, however, and Bugatti cars are currently produced by Volkswagen.

Ettore came from an artistic family in Milan. His father, Carlo Bugatti, was a successful designer of Italian Art Nouveau furniture and jewelry, while his paternal grandfather, Giovanni Luigi Bugatti, had been an architect and sculptor.  His younger brother, Rembrandt Bugatti, became well known for his animal sculpture.

Ettore - full name Ettore Arco Isidoro Bugatti - displayed both artistic talent and an interest in motor vehicles at a young age. He attended the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in his home city before becoming apprenticed to the bicycle manufacturer Prinetti and Stucchi, where at the age of 17 he successfully attached an engine to a tricycle.

A Type 35 Bugatti, the car that brought the company many race successes, including its first Grand Prix
A Type 35 Bugatti, the car that brought the company
many race successes, including its first Grand Prix
With financial support from his father, he began to produce prototype cars, the second of which won a prize at the Milan Trade Fair in 1901. Bugatti's design also caught the eye of the wealthy Baron de Dietrich, who offered him an opportunity to design cars at his factory in Niederbronn, a town then in Germany but now in the Alsace region of northeastern France.

Bugatti produced his first racing car in 1903, but fell out with De Dietrich over his attention to racing cars over production models and moved to work for the French manufacturer Emil Mathis in Strasbourg, although again it was a short-lived relationship. By 1907 he was working for the Deutz engine company in Cologne.

He went alone for the first time in 1909, buying a disused dyeworks in Molsheim, abou 25km (16 miles) west of Strasbourg, where with the financial backing of the Spanish racing driver Pierre De Vizcaya and a bank loan, he began work to produce 10 cars and five aeroplane engines.

Bugatti produced his first so-called ‘pur sang’ (thoroughbred) Bugattis - a term he invented himself - with the Type 10/13 in 1910, a car in which his factory driver, Ernest Friederich, came second in the French Grand Prix at the first attempt in 1911.

Ettore Bugatti (right) and his son Jean discuss race tactics
Ettore Bugatti (right) and his son Jean discuss race tactics
The company’s reputation for producing some of the fastest, most luxurious, and technologically advanced road cars of their day soon spread. Among the clients who purchased a Bugatti car was the celebrated French fighter pilot Roland Garros.

Bugatti branched more into aircraft engines during the First World War but returned to cars once peace resumed and between the wars Bugatti cars enjoyed notable success on the track.

The 1924 Type 35 brought the marque its first Grand Prix victory in Lyon, while Bugattis swept to victory in the Targa Florio, the road race in Sicily, for five years in a row from 1925 to 1929.

Between 1921 and 1939 Bugattis won more than 30 major races, including the French Grand Prix six times and the Monaco Grand Prix four times, culminating in the 24 Hours of Le Mans twice, in 1937 and 1939, with the Type 57, driven by Jean-Pierre Wimille and Pierre Veyron, whose name has since been immortalised in the most famous of modern Bugattis.

The Bugatti Veyron is regarded by experts as one of the best cars ever produced for looks and performance
The Bugatti Veyron is regarded by experts as one of
the best cars ever produced for looks and performance
On the production side, the company enjoyed huge success through the 1920s but suffered in the financial crash of the 1930s, which was a disaster for the first of the Bugatti Royales, the luxury 12.7 litre open-top limousine, of which only three were sold after the market disappeared.

Tragedy struck when Ettore Bugatti's son, Jean Bugatti, was killed in 1939 at the age of 30 while testing a Type 57 near the Molsheim factory. After that, the company's fortunes began to decline.  A strike in 1936 hit the company hard and the Second World War saw the factory in Molsheim transferred to a German owner by compulsory purchase.

The Molsheim plant was given back to Bugatti after the war but lack of funds meant the company could never return to its pre-war prosperity. Ettore, by then living in Paris, suffered pneumonia followed by a stroke and died in 1947 at the age of 65.

Married twice, he fathered two daughters and two sons, the youngest of whom, Roland Bugatti, took over the running of the company in 1951 but was unable to save it, production coming to an end in 1956, the closure of the company following in 1963.

The company name was revived 24 years later, however, when the Italian entrepreneur Romano Artioli bought the rights to the Bugatti trademark and began manufacturing cars at Campogalliano, near Modena.

It was subsequently acquired by Volkswagen in 1998, with the help of whose expertise the Bugatti name has again come to symbolise luxury and high performance. The Bugatti Veyron, of which production began in 2005 at a refurbished Molsheim plant, has propelled it back to the top of the tree in the limited production exclusive sports car market, earning the title ‘greatest car of the past 20 years’ in a poll conducted by the UK magazine Top Gear that attracted more than 100,000 entries.

The Palazzo Brera is home to the Accademia di Belle Arti
The Palazzo Brera is home to the Accademia di Belle Arti
Travel tip:

The Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, sometimes shortened to Accademia di Brera, is a state-run tertiary public academy of fine arts in Via Brera in Milan, in a building it shares with the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan's main public museum for art. The academy was founded in 1776 by Maria Theresa of Austria and shared its premises with other cultural and scientific institutions, including an astronomical observatory, botanical garden, school of philosophy and law, laboratories for physics and chemistry, and a library. The main building, the Palazzo Brera, was built in about 1615 to designs by Francesco Maria Richini.

The first Targa Florio in 1906 was won by Alessandro Cagno, driving an Turin-based Itala car
The first Targa Florio in 1906 was won by Alessandro
Cagno, driving an Turin-based Itala car
Travel tip:

The Targa Florio was an open road endurance car race held in the mountains of Sicily near the island's capital of Palermo between 1906 and 1977, when it was discontinued due to safety concerns. Conceived by the wealthy pioneer race driver Vincenzo Florio, it was for a time the oldest surviving sports car racing event in the world. While early races were eventually extended to a whole tour of the island, covering a distance of 975km (606 miles), it was in time shortened to a circuit of just 72km (45 miles). The race started and finished at the village of Cerda, 45km (28 miles) southeast of Palermo.

More reading:

Enzo Ferrari and the automobile world's most famous name

The insult that fired the Lamborghini-Ferrari rivalry

How Battista 'Pinin' Farina changed the way cars looked

Also on this day:

1616: Europe's first free public school opens in Frascati, near Rome

1904: The birth of Umberto di Savoia, the last king of Italy


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16 April 2018

Fortunino Matania - artist and illustrator

War artist famous also for images of British history


Fortunino Matania was one of the leading 20th century magazine artists
Fortunino Matania was one of the leading
20th century magazine artists
Chevalier Fortunino Matania, a prodigiously talented artist who became known as one of the greatest magazine illustrators in publishing history, was born on this day in 1881 in Naples.

Matania made his name largely in England, where in 1904 he joined the staff of The Sphere, the illustrated news magazine that was founded in London in 1900 in competition with The Graphic and the Illustrated London News.

The use of photography on a commercial scale was in its infancy and artists who could work under deadline pressure to produce high-quality, realistic images to accompany news stories were in big demand.

Never short of work, he was commissioned by magazines across Europe, including many in his native Italy.

Matania’s best known work was from the battlegrounds of the First World War but he also covered every major event - marriages, christenings, funerals and state occasions - from the coronation of Edward VII in 1902 to that of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.  He produced illustrations of the Sinking of the Titanic for The Sphere.

He was also in demand to design advertising posters, such as those inviting travellers on the LNER and other railways to visit Blackpool or Southport. He created posters, too, for Ovaltine and Burberry, the sports outfitter.

Matania was the war artist for the London magazine The Sphere
Matania was the war artist for the
London magazine The Sphere
Later in his career, he drew voluptuous women, often nude, for the women’s magazine Britannia and Eve, and was one of the first illustrators hired to work on the ground-breaking children’s magazine, Look and Learn.

Fascinated with British royalty and the Empire, Matania wrote as well as illustrated historical stories and in the years up to his death in 1963 produced a series of paintings for the Look and Learn publisher Leonard Matthews called a Pageant of Kings, which began with William the Conqueror and the Battle of Hastings.

He was working on a painting entitled Richard II and His Child Bride when he died in London at the age of 81.

Matania’s prolific output also included illustrations to be used in Hollywood movies.

His talent was plainly in his genes, to a certain extent. His father was Eduardo Matania, an artist who became an illustrator for magazines in Italy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

He studied at his father's studio, designing a soap advertisement at the age of nine and exhibiting his first work at Naples Academy by the times he was 11.

By the age of 14, he was good enough to take on some of his father’s workload for books and magazines and earned a commission in his own right to produce weekly illustrations for the periodical L'Illustrazione Italiania.

Matania was also in demand to create advertising posters, this one extolling the virtues of winter in Southport
Matania was also in demand to create advertising posters,
this one extolling the virtues of winter in Southport
He took the bold step to move to Paris in 1901 to work for Illustration Francaise. It was an invitation to cover the Coronation of Edward VII for The Graphic in 1902 that took him to London, where he quickly became in such demand that he stayed.

It was his coverage of the Great War that made it clear he was possessed of extraordinary talent. Not only was he able to work at great speed, he was able to recreate scenes as if he was using a camera, noting small details of the way people stood or moved and the expressions on their faces and bringing them together in vivid scenes so natural as if he had captured a moment in time exactly as it was when he saw it.

Although he spared readers the worst elements of what he had seen, his illustrations as much as anything in the news coverage of the conflict brought home to readers the full horrors of the conflict.

Naples, looking from Mergellina towards Santa Lucia
Naples, looking from Mergellina towards Santa Lucia
Travel tip:

Eduardo Matania produced many paintings depicting the life of fishermen and their families on the Bay of Naples, particularly in the Santa Lucia area, a neighbourhood clustered around the Castel dell’Ovo and only a short distance from the Royal Palace. Today, the area is a good place to eat, with many restaurants setting up around the harbour.

The Brera district has many restaurants
The Brera district has many restaurants
Travel tip:

The publishing centre of Milan was traditionally in the Brera district, an area just to the north of the city centre which once had the Bohemian atmosphere of a kind of Italian Montmartre.  Nowadays, it is the home of the Pinacoteca di Brera, one of the city’s major art galleries, and also of many fine restaurants, and retains its chic reputation.

More reading:

Felice Beato, the Venetian who may have been the world's first war photographer

How war injuries suffered in Italy inspired the great writer Ernest Hemingway

The First World War nurse who was made a saint

Also on this day:

1118: The death of Adelaide del Vasto, Countess of Sicily

1839: The birth of Antonio Starabba, twice Italy's prime minister


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23 January 2018

Luisa Casati – heiress and muse

Outrageous marchioness saw herself as a living work of art


The Marchesa Casati photographed by Adolfo de Meyer in 1912
The Marchesa Casati photographed by
Adolfo de Meyer in 1912
The heiress, socialite and artist’s muse Luisa Casati, known for her outlandish dresses, exotic pets and hedonistic lifestyle, was born on this day in 1881 in Milan.

Casati, born into a wealthy background, married a marquis – Camillo, Marchese Casati Stampa di Soncino – when she was 19 and provided him with a daughter, Cristina, a year later, yet the marriage was never strong and they kept separate residences from an early stage.

It was not long before she tired of a life bound by formalities and the strict rules of etiquette and everything changed after she met the poet, patriot and lothario Gabriele D’Annunzio at a society hunt.

They became lovers and D’Annunzio introduced her to the world of writers and artists.  Tall, almost painfully thin and with striking looks, she became a creature of fascination for many young artists, who craved the attention of this eccentric aristocrat and the chance to paint her.

Their interest only encouraged the Marchesa Casati to indulge her taste for the extravagant, posing in ever-more outlandish dresses, embracing the culture of the Belle Époque. Her wealth enabled her to throw lavish parties and in 1910 she moved to Venice, taking up residence in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal, the palace that now houses the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

Casati in 1922 in a typically outrageous dress
Casati in 1922 in a typically
outrageous dress
There she created a fantastical lifestyle, assembling an extraordinary menagerie of pets that included a pair of cheetahs, a boa constrictor, white peacocks trained to perch on her window sills, a flock of albino blackbirds and greyhounds whose coats she dyed blue.

She staged enormous, elaborate parties, in which she paraded herself in increasingly ridiculous costumes, such as a dress made entirely of lightbulbs, which at one point gave her such a powerful electric shock she was thrown backwards across the room. 

Naturally shy, the Marchesa concentrated on making an impression through how she looked. She contrasted her fiery red hair with skin that she kept a deathly white, dropped belladonna in her eyes to dilate her pupils and framed them with black eye liner and false eyelashes.  She delighted in prowling the atmospheric Venetian streets after dark, with her jewel-collared cheetahs on leads, herself often naked beneath a cloak embroidered with emeralds.

Her parties, in Rome and Paris as well as Venice, may have seemed like merely excuses for decadence and excess, with opium and cocaine a common indulgence among some of the guests, but were affairs that she choreographed carefully, with clothes, décor and entertainment precisely planned according to whichever theme she chose.  She saw herself as a living work of art.

She was certainly an inspiration for works of art.  Giovanni Boldini, Paolo Troubetzkoy, Adolph de Meyer and Romaine Brooks were among those painters who were in her thrall, along with Futurists such as Fortunato Depero and Umberto Boccioni. She had affairs with several. Augustus John's portrait of her is one of the most popular paintings at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The Marchesa with a greyhound, painted by Giovanni Boldoni
The Marchesa with a greyhound,
painted by Giovanni Boldoni
D'Annunzio is said to have based the character of Isabella Inghirami in Forse che si forse che no (Maybe yes, maybe no) on Casati, while the character of La Casinelle, who appeared in two novels by Michel Georges-Michel, was also inspired by her. Plays and movies were written featuring characters based on the Marchesa, with actresses such as Vivien Leigh and Ingrid Bergman in the lead roles.

She patronised a number of fashion designers. John Galliano, Karl Lagerfeld and Alexander McQueen created collections based on or inspired by her, while the British designers Georgina Chapman and Karen Craig had her in mind when they opened a fashion house called Marchesa.

It was all a far cry from a childhood lived in a palace in Milan and villas in Monza and on Lake Como. Her father was Alberto Amman, a giant in the textile industry who was made a Count by Umberto I and whose death when Luisa was 15 made her and her sister, Francesca, the two wealthiest young women in Italy.

But her extravagances did not come cheap.  By 1920 she was living on Capri at the Swedish psychiatrist Axel Munthe’s Villa San Michele and moved out of the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in the mid-1920s.  By 1930 she had amassed personal debts of $25 million and was forced to auction off her possessions.

Pursued by creditors, she fled to London and lived in a one-bedroom flat. It was just around the corner from Harrods in hardly the least salubrious part of the city, yet placed her reduced circumstances by her standards.

Casati's grave in London
Casati's grave in London
She died in London in June 1957 at her address in Beaufort Gardens in Knightsbridge at the age of 76, having suffered a stroke.  She was buried at Brompton Cemetery, one of her few remaining friends having seen to it that she was dressed in a leopard skin and black outfit and false eyelashes, with one of her taxidermied Pekinese dogs at her side.

Among just a handful of mourners at her funeral was an elderly man who had travelled from Venice, where half a century earlier he had been her personal gondolier.  Her grave is marked with a small tombstone shaped like an urn draped in cloth, bearing the inscription ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety’ from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.

An autumnal scene in Milan's Parco Nord
An autumnal scene in Milan's Parco Nord
Travel tip:

The Marchesa Casati’s married home in Milan was the Villa Casati, a stately mansion on the edge of what is now Parco Nord, a suburban park that was once an airfield, in Cinisello Balsamo, then a town in its own right, now more of a suburb. It is on the northern edge of the Milan metropolitan area, about 10km (6 miles) from the city centre. More than 75,000 people now live there.

The Grand Canal frontage of the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
The Grand Canal frontage of the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
Travel tip:

The Palazzo Venier dei Leoni is a palace on the Grand Canal in Venice once owned by a noble Venetian family of the 14th to 16th century, three of whom – Antonio Venier, Francesco Venier and Sebastiano Venier – were Doges.  It was bought by the American socialite and arts patron Peggy Guggenheim in 1949 and she lived there for 30 years, opening her collection of artworks to the public for the first time in 1951.  It is in the Dorsoduro quarter of Venice, near where it emerges into the lagoon, accessed from San Marco via the Accademia Bridge.




4 January 2018

Gaetano Merola – conductor and impresario

Neapolitan who founded the San Francisco Opera


Gaetano Merola ran the San Francisco Opera Company for 30 years
Gaetano Merola ran the San Francisco Opera
Company for 30 years
Gaetano Merola, a musician from Naples who emigrated to the United States and ultimately founded the San Francisco Opera, was born on this day in 1881.

Merola directed the company and conducted many performances for 30 years from its opening night in September 1923 until his death in August 1953.

He literally died doing what he loved, collapsing in the orchestra pit while conducting the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra during a concert at an outdoor amphitheatre in the city.

The son of a violinist at the Royal Court in Naples, Merola studied piano and conducting at the Conservatorio di San Pietro a Majella in Naples, graduating with honours at the age of 16.

Three years later he was invited to New York to work as assistant to Luigi Mancinelli, another Italian emigrant, born in Orvieto, who was a noted composer and cellist who was lead conductor of the New York Metropolitan Opera.

Demand for his services grew and he made regular guest appearances with companies across America and beyond, including a stint at Oscar Hammerstein’s London Opera House on the site of what is now the Peacock Theatre in Holborn.

Merola in action with the baton
He became a regular visitor to San Francisco with Fortune Gallo’s San Carlo Opera Company – named after the Naples opera house – and it was after becoming acquainted with many opera enthusiasts there that he identified the city as potentially one to rival New York as a centre that could attract the world’s top stars.

Merola noted how much the city was prepared to pay to have such illustrious companies as the Chicago Opera and the Scotti Company as well as the San Carlo to perform there and determined that he would be the man to give San Francisco its own company and make it as prestigious as any across the country.

Invited to make his home there by a philanthropic patron of the arts who set Merola and his wife up in an apartment, he immersed himself in the city’s large Italian community, where there was much enthusiasm about his ambition to bring the world's finest opera stars to the city.

When, in 1922, he hit upon the idea of a two-week season of open air concerts at Stanford Stadium, where he had noted during a football game how much the half-time marching band benefitted from the venue’s acoustics, they were all for it and there was no shortage of businessmen and wealthy professionals from the community willing to offer financial support, investing between $500 and $1,000 each in the venture.

Beniamino Gigli was one of the big names Merola was able to attract to perform in San Francisco
Beniamino Gigli was one of the big names Merola
was able to attract to perform in San Francisco
Merola signed up many stars of the day, including the Italian tenor Giovanni Martinelli, the American soprano Bianca Soraya and the Spanish baritone Vincente Ballester. The audiences were large and enthusiastic, rising from around 6,000 for the opening performance of I Pagliacci to 10,000 for Faust on the closing night.

Yet it made no money.  Indeed, once the costs were reckoned up, Merola had to tell his backers they were liable to a $19,000 shortfall.  He feared his dream was over until Giulio Stradi, a produce retailer who was one of the bigger investors, spoke up for the rest of the group by putting an arm round Merola’s shoulder and telling him the experience had been worth every penny.

They paid his dues in full and encouraged him to pursue another funding scheme, this time not relying on the largesse of a small number of wealthy patrons but by finding 750 individuals willing to pay $100 each, which included a $50 season ticket.

In the event, Merola attracted more than 2,400 investors and comfortably hit his funding target. His San Francisco Opera Company was born and made its debut at the city’s Civic Auditorium with Martinelli and soprano Queena Mario starring in Puccini’s La bohème.

The War Memorial Opera House opened in 1932
The War Memorial Opera House opened in 1932
More productions followed, with headline stars including Beniamino Gigli and Giuseppe de Luca, and by the end of the 1923-24 season he was able to pay his investors a dividend.

The San Francisco Opera was now established and its continued success in spite of the financial Depression led in 1931 to the construction of a permanent home, the grand Palladian-style War Memorial Opera House, designed by the architect Arthur Brown Jr.  It opened in October 1932 with a performance of Puccini’s Tosca, with the Italian soprano Claudia Muzio in the title role.

Merola began to wind down in the 1940s, bringing in Arturo Toscanini’s assistant Kurt Herbert Adler to serve as conductor, choral director and his deputy.  Merola, meanwhile, continued to use his contacts to attract the biggest names to San Francisco, including Tito Gobbi, Renata Tebaldi and Mario del Monaco.

After Merola’s death, which came as he conducted an excerpt from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly at the Sigmund Stern Grove amphitheatre, Adler established in his honour the Merola Opera Program to provide training for young singers.

The San Francisco Opera still thrives to this day.  In 2002, when it celebrated its 80th anniversary, the guests included 98-year-old Louise Dana – the former Louise Stradi, daughter of Giulio, who had helped Merola with the organisation of his first season.

The Conservatorio di San Pietro a Majella
The Conservatorio di San Pietro a Majella
Travel tip:

The Conservatorio di San Pietro a Majella – often known as the Naples Conservatory – can be found a short distance from Piazza Dante in the centre of Naples. Along with the adjacent church, it is part of the former San Pietro a Majella monastic complex, built at the end of the 13th century. The conservatory houses an impressive library of manuscripts giving an insight into the life and work of many great composers who spent time there, including Scarlatti, Pergolesi, Cimarosa, Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. The museum has a display of rare antique musical instruments.

The Teatro di San Carlo in Naples is the oldest continuously  active opera venue in the world
The Teatro di San Carlo in Naples is the oldest continuously
 active opera venue in the world 
Travel tip:

The Teatro di San Carlo, the opera house of Naples, was opened in 1737 after the Bourbon king Charles III of Naples commissioned its construction as a replacement for the small and somewhat dilapidated Teatro San Bartolomeo, which was no longer big enough to satisfy demand in the city after the popular composer Alessandro Scarlatti had decided to base himself there and was establishing Naples as a major centre for opera.  Although it was partly destroyed by a fire in 1816, the theatre was rebuilt on the orders of Charles III’s son, King Ferdinand IV, and is regarded as the oldest continuously active public venue for opera in the world, predating Milan’s Teatro alla Scala and Venice’s Fenice by several decades.








  

8 October 2017

Vincenzo Peruggia – art thief

Gallery worker who stole the Mona Lisa


A police mugshot of Vincenzo Peruggia
A police mugshot of Vincenzo Peruggia
Vincenzo Peruggia, a handyman who earned notoriety when he pulled off the most famous art theft in history, was born on this day in 1881 in Dumenza in Lombardy, a village on the Swiss border.

Peruggia stole Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa from the Louvre in Paris and evaded detection for more than two years, even though he was questioned by police over the painting’s disappearance.

It was only when he attempted to sell the iconic painting - thought to be of Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a cloth and silk merchant - to an art dealer in Florence that he was arrested.

Experts accept that, although the Mona Lisa - sometimes known in Italy as La Gioconda - was a notable work, it is open to debate whether it was the best of all the magnificent pieces created by the Tuscan Renaissance genius, whose other masterpieces included The Last Supper and The Virgin of the Rocks and other outstanding portraits, such as The Lady with an Ermine.

Yet it is without question the most famous painting in the world and enjoys that status largely because of Peruggia’s audacious crime.

The theft took place on August 21, 1911, a Monday morning, when Peruggia removed the painting from the wall of the Salon Carré in the Musée du Louvre on the Right Bank of the Seine. He took the canvas from its frame inside a protective glass case and left the building with it hidden under a smock.

Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa
Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa
Detail varies in the stories of the theft. Some say he entered the Louvre the day before, knowing the museum would be closed on the Monday, hid in a closet overnight and left the following morning, wearing a coat of the kind worn by workers at the gallery and concealing the canvas underneath.

His own version of events under interrogation was that he entered the museum at 7am on the Monday morning, mingling with a group of employees arriving for work.  He claimed he had gone to the Salon Carré and waited until it was unattended before making off with the painting.

Thefts were not uncommon at the Louvre at the time and there were 200 security staff.  However, with 400 rooms to watch over the guards could not be in two places at once.  It was not unusual, in any case, for paintings to be removed sometimes, so that the frame and case could be cleaned.

Peruggia may have stolen the coat but it is possible he was in possession of one anyway, having previously worked at the gallery, where one of his jobs, ironically, was making glass cases of the kind in which the Mona Lisa was kept.

What is not disputed is that he took the painting back to his apartment in Paris and hid it inside a trunk with a false bottom. Police visited him in the apartment twice but accepted his story that he had been working elsewhere on the day of the theft.

Peruggia, who had done some painting himself and moved to Paris in 1908 in the hope of being discovered, remained in the French capital for two years, in which time the press indulged in endless speculation as to who might be responsible.

Another Da Vinci portrait, Lady with an Ermine, which some experts believe is superior.
Another Da Vinci portrait, Lady with an Ermine,
which some experts believe is superior.
A theory that modernist enemies of traditional art must be involved led to Pablo Picasso coming under suspicion for a while. Indeed, police arrested the avantgarde poet and playwright Guillaume Apollinaire and questioned him for a week before being letting him go.

In the meantime, the story of the mystery of its whereabouts turned the Mona Lisa into the best known work of art in the world.

Eventually, in November 1913, calling himself Leonardo Vincenzo, Peruggia made his move, writing to Alfredo Geri, an art dealer who kept a gallery in Florence with an offer to bring the painting to Italy.

He claimed he would be performing an act of patriotism, believing the Mona Lisa was in France only because Napoleon had stolen it.  In fact, while Napoleon at one time had it in his home, it was rightfully in the possession of the French nation, having been bought from Leonardo da Vinci by King Francis I in 1516.

Peruggia travelled to Florence by train, having packed his clothes and other possessions in the trunk containing the canvas. He took the painting to Geri, whereupon he somewhat undermined the magnanimity of his ‘patriotic’ gesture by asking for a reward of 500,000 lire.

Geri persuaded him to leave the painting overnight so that he could show it to Giovanni Poggi, director of the Uffizi Gallery, for authentication. In fact, Geri contacted the police and when Peruggia returned to his hotel he was arrested.

In the event, despite the criminal circumstances of its arrival, the return of the painting to Italy was celebrated. Visitors flocked to the Uffizi to see it before it was returned to the Louvre.  The 31-year-old Peruggia was given only a short jail sentence and, on release, joined the Italian army to fight in the First World War.

At the end of the conflict he returned to Paris with his wife, Celestina, and a child, opening a paint shop.  He died young, on his 44th birthday.

Luino sits on the shore of Lake Maggiore
Luino sits on the shore of Lake Maggiore
Travel tip:

Peruggia’s home village of Dumenza, in the province of Varese, is situated in the pre-Alpine slopes that rise from the northern shores of Lake Maggiore, almost on the border with Switzerland. The nearest town is Luino, a popular tourist destination on the lake, which has a noteworthy weekly market and a number of fine churches, including the parish church of San Pietro in Campagna.

The courtyard between the two wings of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence
The courtyard between the two wings of
the Uffizi Gallery in Florence
Travel tip:

The Uffizi Gallery in Florence, which takes its name from its origins as a building housing the administrative offices (uffizi – nowadays uffici) of the Florentine magistrates at the time of the Medici, contains a huge collection of art works divided between 101 rooms with 13,000 square metres of exhibition space, including paintings by Cimabue, Michelangelo, Giotto, Botticelli, Titian, Caravaggio, Raphael and Rembrandt.  Da Vinci’s The Annunciation and Adoration of the Magi are among his works on display.

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11 February 2017

Carlo Carrà - Futurist artist

Painter hailed for capturing violence at anarchist's funeral



Carlo Carrà, pictured in the late 1930s
Carlo Carrà, pictured in the late 1930s
The painter Carlo Carrà, a leading figure in the Futurist movement that gained popularity in Italy in the early part of the 20th century, was born on this day in 1881 in Quargnento, a village about 11km (7 miles) from Alessandria in Piedmont.

Futurism was an avant-garde artistic, social and political movement that was launched by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909 and attracted many painters and sculptors, designers and architects, writers, film makers and composers who wished to embrace modernity and free Italy from what they perceived as a stifling obsession with the past.

The Futurists admired the speed and technological advancement of cars and aeroplanes and the new industrial cities, all of which they saw as demonstrating the triumph of humanity over nature through invention. They were also fervent nationalists and encouraged the youth of Italy to rise up in violent revolution against the establishment.

The movement was associated with anarchism. Indeed, Carrà counted himself as an anarchist in his youth and his best known work emerged from that period, when he attended the funeral of a fellow anarchist, Angelo Galli, who was killed by police during a general strike in Milan in 1906.

Carrà's most famous work, The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli. which is housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Carrà's most famous work, The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli,
which is housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
As Galli's body was carried to the cemetery, violence erupted between anarchist mourners and the police. Carrà witnessed the clashes and hastened home to make sketches of what he had seen while the images were still fresh. They became the basis for his 1911 painting, The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli.

The abstract painting, which demonstrated strong Cubist influences and is seen as Carrà's masterpiece, shows Galli’s red coffin at the centre of the canvas, held precariously aloft amid a chaotic melee of figures clad in anarchist black, illuminated by light emanating both from the coffin and the sun.

In his memoirs, Carrà described the riot at the funeral, noting that the coffin, covered in red carnations, "swayed  dangerously on the shoulders of the pallbearers."

"I saw horses go mad, sticks and lances clash," he wrote. "It seemed to me that the corpse could have fallen to the ground at any moment and the horses would have trampled it."

Carrà had left home when he was only 12 in order to work as a mural decorator, the work taking him to Paris, where he became interested in contemporary French art, and to London, where he made the acquaintance of a number of exiled Italian anarchists.

Carrà (second left) in Paris in 1912 with Luigi Russolo, Filippo   Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini
Carrà (second left) in Paris in 1912 with Luigi Russolo, Filippo
  Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini
This shaped his life when he returned to Italy in 1901 and settled in Milan, where he enrolled at the Accademia di Brera and began to associate with anarchist groups. Along with Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo and Giacomo Balla, in 1910 he signed the Manifesto of Futurist Painters, which emphasised a commitment to the dynamic portrayal of movement in their paintings, with particular reference to scenes of violent riot.

In the event, in the view of art experts, Carrà's Futurist phase ended around the time the First World War began, at which point his work began to move away from the influence of an angry political ideology towards stillness and calm and from motion towards clearer form, influenced among other factors by his fascination with the work of the French post-impressionist Henri Rousseau.

In 1917 he moved into another phase after meeting the surrealist Giorgio de Chirico in Ferrara. Carrà began to include mannequin-like figures in his paintings and the two between them invented the Scuola Metafisica - the metaphysical school, the idea of which was to stress a dislocation between the present and the past, illustrated perhaps by classical figures shown against contemporary backgrounds.

Within a couple of years, Carrà had begun to depart from that phase, his work The Daughters of Lot, painted in 1919, showing the influence of the genius of the early Renaissance, Giotto, who is acknowledged as the first painter to capture true human emotions.

Carrà's political views also changed. He became more opposed to the social reform he supported as a younger man, becoming ultra-nationalist. He found the ideals of Fascism coincided increasingly with his own.

The Basilica of San Dalmazio in Carra's home village of Quargnento
The Basilica of San Dalmazio in Carrà's
home village of Quargnento
In the 1930s, Carrà signed a manifesto in which called for support of state ideology through art, joining a group founded by Giorgio Morandi, another artist with Fascist sympathies and a background in Futurism and the Scuola Metafisica, which responded to the neo-classical guidelines set by the regime in the late 1930s.

After military service in the Second World War, Carrà taught at the University of Milan. He died in 1966, aged 85.

Travel tip:

Quargnento, where Carlo Carrà was born, was originally a Roman settlement, as evidenced by the discovery by archaeologists of the ruins of a Roman garrison. It became a large farming town during the Western Roman Empire, supplying neighbouring cities. Later, the town came under the control of the Bishop of Asti, who made the significant decision in 907 to order the remains of the Christian martyr Dalmazio to be hidden there from raiding Saracens.  The remains today are housed in the Basilica of San Dalmazio.


Carrà's 1914 work Interventionist Demonstration is part of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Carrà's 1914 work Interventionist Demonstration
is part of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Travel tip:

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice is home to the works of many prominent Futurist painters, including Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini and Luigi Russolo. It houses Carrà's 1914 work, Interventionist Demonstration, a Cubist-influenced collage of fragments of paper bearing words, radiating from the centre in concentric circles, said to have been inspired by the sight of leaflets dropped from aeroplanes fluttering down over Piazza del Duomo.

Venice hotels by Hotels.com

More reading:


How architect Marcello Piacentini's buildings symbolised Fascist ideals

The cycle of frescoes that confirmed the genius of Giotto

The anarchist whose 'accidental death' inspired Dario Fo's classic play

Also on this day:


1929: The Lateran Treaty turns the Vatican into an independent state

(Picture credits: Basilica by Tony Frisina via Wikimedia Commons)

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8 December 2016

Marcello Piacentini – architect

Designer whose buildings symbolised Fascist ideals


Marcello Piacentini in the uniform of the Royal Academy of Italy
Marcello Piacentini in the uniform of the
Royal Academy of Italy
Urban theorist and architect Marcello Piacentini was born on this day in 1881 in Rome.

The son of architect Pio Piacentini, he studied arts and engineering in Rome before going on to become one of the main proponents of the stark, linear designs characteristic of the Fascist era.

When he was just 26, he was commissioned with redesigning the centre of the Lombardy city Bergamo’s lower town, the Città Bassa, where Piacentini's buildings remain notable landmarks today.  The project marked Piacentini as an architect of considerable vision and talent.

He then went on to work throughout Italy, and in particular in Rome, for the Fascist government.

He designed a new campus for the University of Rome, La Sapienza, the road approaching St Peter’s in Rome that was named Via della Conciliazione, and much of the EUR district of the capital, of which he was not only the architect but, by appointment to the Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, the High Commissar.

Piacentini's majestic Via della Conciliazione in Rome, with the Basilica of St Peter in the background
Piacentini's majestic Via della Conciliazione in Rome, with
the Basilica of St Peter in the background
Characteristic of all these projects was Piacentini's simplified neoclassicism, which became the mainstay of Fascist architecture.

Both Mussolini and Adolf Hitler believed that a style of architecture identifiable as belonging to their culture was a way of unifying citizens and underlining the tenets of their ideology, namely strength and stability and the authority of the government.

Subsequently, Piacentini went on to become an important colonial architect, particularly in Eastern Libya, where the style of his buildings was characteristic of the Neo-Moorish period in Libya in the 1920s.

After the collapse of Fascism, Piacentini fell out of favour and did not work as an architect for several years.  He died in Rome in 1960.

Travel tip:

One of the most impressive buildings to be seen in Bergamo’s Città Bassa - the city's lower town - is the Banca d’Italia in Viale Roma. Built of brown stone, in keeping with the other public buildings erected at the beginning of the 20th century in the Città Bassa, the bank has a decorative façade. It was built in 1924 to a neo-Renaissance design and has since become a symbol of Bergamo’s strong commercial and banking tradition.

Hotels in Bergamo by Hotels.com

The Torre dei Caduti was part of  Piacentini's urban redevlopment of Bergamo
The Torre dei Caduti was part of  Piacentini's
urban redevelopment of Bergamo
Travel tip:

Another example of Piacentini’s work in Bergamo is the Torre dei Caduti in the centre of the Città Bassa. The early 20th century war memorial towers over Piazza Vittorio Veneto and Via Sentierone but was carefully positioned so that despite being 45 metres tall it does not spoil the skyline of the Città Alta, Bergamo's upper town. The Torre dei Caduti (tower of the fallen) was built to honour the citizens of Bergamo who were killed in the First World War and was part of Piacentini’s new layout for the centre of the Città Bassa in the 1920s, which recalled the buildings of the Città Alta, such as the Torre di Gombito, in the choice of design and materials.

More reading:


The ground-breaking brilliance of architect Pier Luigi Nervi

The Liberty and Art Deco lines of Milan's huge Stazione Centrale

Andrea Palladio - the world's favourite architect


Also on this day:


Feast of the Immaculate Conception marks start of Christmas

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