Giovanni Amendola - journalist and politician

Liberal writer died following attack by Mussolini’s thugs

Giovanni Amendola was a committed anti-Fascist who
accused Mussolini of murdering a fellow politician

Giovanni Amendola, a dedicated opponent of Fascism, was born on this day in 1882 in Naples in southern Italy.

As a critic of the right wing extremists in Italy, Amendola had to suffer a series of attacks by hired thugs. He endured a particularly brutal beating in 1925 by 15 Blackshirts armed with clubs near Montecatini Terme in Tuscany and he later died as a result of his injuries, becoming one of the earliest victims of the Fascist regime.

Amendola had obtained a degree in philosophy and contributed to the newspapers, Il Leonardo and La Voce, expressing his philosophical and ideological views. He was given the chair of theoretical philosophy at the University of Pisa but, attracted by politics, he stood for parliament and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies three times to represent Salerno.

He began contributing to Il Resto di Carlino and Corriere della Sera, urging Italy’s entry into World War I in 1915. He then fought as a volunteer, reaching the rank of captain and winning a medal for valour.

Amendola supported the Italian Liberal movement but was completely against the ideology of prime minister Giovanni Giolitti. During the war he adopted a position of democratic irredentism and at the end of hostilities was nominated as a minister by prime minister Francesco Saverio Nitti.

Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti was murdered
on the orders of Fascist leader Benito Mussolini

In 1924 Amendola refused to adhere to the ‘Listone Mussolini’ and attempted to become prime minister himself at the head of a liberal coalition. He was defeated in the election but continued his battle for democracy, writing for Il Mondo, a new daily newspaper, which he had founded together with other intellectuals.

Amendola is famous for publishing the Rossi Testimony in December 1924. The document directly implicated the prime minister, Mussolini, in the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, the leader of the Socialist PSU party as well as declaring that Mussolini was behind the reign of terror that had led up to the 1924 elections.

Amendola was one of the deputies who withdrew from the Chamber in protest against the result afterwards. In spite of the threats against his life that had been made during the election campaign, he declared the Fascist government to be unconstitutional.

He was resented by Mussolini for his prominent opposition and as a result suffered an horrific attack in July 1925. He managed to get out of the country and into the south of France but, still suffering from his severe injuries, he died in April 1926 in Cannes.

Amendola left a wife and four children. His eldest son, Giorgio Amendola, became an important political writer and politician.

The statue of Giovanni Amendola in
front of Salerno's Palazzo di Giustizia

Travel tip:

Salerno, the city represented in parliament by Giovanni Amendola, is in Campania in southern Italy on the Gulf of Salerno on the Tyrrhenian Sea. It has a Greek and Roman heritage and was an important Lombard principality in the middle ages, when the first medical school in the world was founded there. King Victor Emmanuel III moved there in 1943, making it a provisional seat of Government for six months and it was the scene of Allied landings during the invasion of Italy in World War II.  There is a statue of Giovanni Amendola in front of the Palazzo di Giustizia in Salerno.

The Terme Tettuccio is one of the most famous of
Montecatini Terme's famed spas

Travel tip:

Montecatini Terme in Tuscany, where Amendola suffered the attack that caused his death, is an elegant spa town in the province of Pistoia. Its heyday was in the early part of the 20th century, when restaurants, theatres, nightclubs and a casino were built there and many celebrities visited. The town welcomed the famous composers, Ruggero Leoncavallo, Giuseppe Verdi and Pietro Mascagni, and the tenor, Beniamino Gigli.

Also on this day:

1446: The death of architect Filippo Brunelleschi

1452: The birth of Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci

1754: The death of Venetian mathematician Jacopo Riccati


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Charles Ponzi - fraudster

Name forever linked with investment scam

Charles Ponzi set up in business in Boston
having twice previously been in jail

The swindler Charles Ponzi, whose notorious fraudulent investment scheme in 1920s America led his name to be immortalised in the lexicon of financial crimes, was born Carlo Ponzi in the town of Lugo di Romagna on this day in 1882.

Ponzi, who emigrated to the United States in 1903 but arrived there almost penniless, had been in prison twice - once for theft and a second time for smuggling Italian immigrants illegally into the US from Canada - when he came up with his scheme.

Always on the lookout for ways to make a fast buck, Ponzi identified a way to make profits through exploiting the worldwide market in international postal reply coupons.  This was not his scheme, simply the starting point.

These coupons, which allowed a correspondent in one country to pay for the cost of return postage from another country, were sold at a universal cover price but variations in exchange rates meant that a coupon bought in one country might be worth more in another.  Coupons bought in Italy, for example, could be exchanged for stamps in the US that could then be sold for several times more than the dollar-equivalent cost of the coupon in Italy.

The difference was big enough, Ponzi reckoned, to generate as much as 400 per cent profit. He planned to use his profits to fund an investment scheme by which he could offer returns much higher than any available at the mainstream banks and yet make a handsome margin for himself.

Ponzi's natural charm and snappy dress
was very persuasive in attracting clients

It seemed a guaranteed winner. Although his efforts to borrow money to get the venture started did not work out, Ponzi approached some of his wealthier friends in Boston, Massachusetts, where he had married a local Italian girl, Rose Maria Gnecco, and was working as a translator. He promised to double their money within 90 days, or deliver 50 per cent profit in 45 days, and duly did so.

His next step was to set up his own company and attract investment from the wider public. His Securities Exchange Company attracted $1,800 in the first month. Ponzi delivered his clients vast returns as promised. Word quickly spread.

The more investors he was able to satisfy, the longer the queue to join in. By July 1920, only six months after his launch, Ponzi was accepting investments totalling almost $1 million every day.

He spent lavishly, buying a mansion in Lexington and the most expensive car available. He booked a stateroom on an ocean liner to bring his mother to America from her home in Parma.

Unbeknown to his clients, however, Ponzi’s plan to reinvest their money in international reply coupons had been massively flawed at the outset. To generate the profits he needed would have required him to import millions of coupons. In fact, there were only 27,000 in existence.

Ponzi signs a cheque for a delighted investor in his
Boston office in the spring of 1920

Instead, when clients’ investments matured, Ponzi was paying them with money he received from new investors. There was no external profit at all.  Logically, it was foolhardy to continue. Yet with his total of clients growing every day, he always had a surplus of cash and so long as that was the case he could continue in business. In any event, many of his clients simply reinvested their returns.

The problem for Ponzi was schemes that look too good to be true tend to attract the attention of the disbelieving. In this case, it was the Boston Post newspaper, who began to carry articles posing questions about his success.

After one such article, he sued for $500,000 libel damages and won, yet the seeds of doubt had been planted. More investigations followed, investors began to panic and soon Ponzi was paying out more than he was taking in.

The cover of a recent reprint of Ponzi's
 autobiography, written in the 1940s

His final mistake was to hire a former Post journalist, William McMasters, as his publicity agent. McMasters came across documents that showed Ponzi had kept going by effectively ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’. He sold his story to the Post for $5,000.

More panic followed and then an investigation by the Massachusetts Bank Commissioner. It was the beginning of the end for Ponzi. His bankers stopped honouring his cheques and three of his clients filed a petition in court to declare him bankrupt. In November 1920 he was sentenced to five years in jail. His investors had collectively lost around $20 million.

After further prison terms, in between which, while on bail pending an appeal, he attempted to set up a property scam in Florida, he was deported to Italy in 1934. Divorced in 1937 - his wife stayed behind in Boston - he tried various business schemes without success and eventually settled in Brazil, where he died in 1949, although he did first write his autobiography.

Despite Carlo Ponzi’s inevitable demise, countless others down the years have tried to make money using the same methods. The most high-profile example this century involved the financier and investment advisor Bernie Madoff, who was sentenced to 150 years’ jail in 2009 after running a Ponzi Scheme through his Wall Street brokerage that was ultimately outed as the largest financial fraud in US history, worth $64.8 billion.

The Rocca Estense in Lugo di Romagna now serves as
the town's municipal offices

Travel tip:

Lugo di Romagna is a town of 32,000 people about 30km (19 miles) west of Ravenna and 18km (8 miles) north of Faenza in Emilia-Romagna. Its most famous monument, the Rocca Estense (Este Castle), was partially rebuilt during the French occupation in 1500. The interior houses portraits of famous lughesi and a lunette attributed to Mino da Fiesole. It has been Lugo’s town hall since 1797. Also of note is the 19th century covered market hall known as Il Paviglione and the restored 18th century Teatro Rossini. Apart from Ponzi, famous lughesi include the First World War fighter pilot Francesco Baracca and a former world motorcycling champion, Mario Lega.

The Teatro Regio in Parma, while not so well known as La
Scala in Milan, is considered one of Italy's top opera houses

Travel tip:

Parma, where Ponzi claimed to have grown up after his family moved there from Lugo, is an historic city in the Emilia-Romagna region, famous for its Prosciutto di Parma ham and Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, the true ‘parmesan’. In 1545 the city was given as a duchy to the illegitimate son of Pope Paul III, whose descendants ruled Parma till 1731. The composer Giuseppe Verdi was born near Parma at Bussetto and the city has a prestigious opera house, the Teatro Regio.

More reading:

Michele Sindona - the fraudster with links to the Vatican

The mysterious death of Roberto Calvi

Joe Petrosino - the immigrant who became a New York crime fighter

Also on this day:

1578: The death of Venetian doge Sebastiano Venier

1585: The inauguration of Palladio's Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza

1768: The death of composer Nicola Porpora

Selected books:

Ponzi: The Incredible True Story of the King of Financial Cons, by Donald Dunn

The Rise of Mr Ponzi, by Charles Ponzi

(Picture credits: Rocca Estense by Lalupa; Teatro Regio by Stefano Sansavini; via Wikimedia Commons)


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Umberto Boccioni - painter

Artist who died tragically young was key figure in Futurism

Boccioni's 1905 self-portrait, which can be found in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City

The painter Umberto Boccioni, who became arguably the leading artist of Italian Futurism before the First World War, was born on this day in 1882 in Reggio Calabria.

Futurism was an avant-garde artistic, social and political movement that was launched by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909.  Its ethos was to embrace modernity and free Italy from what was 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. Their work attempted to capture the dynamism of life in a modern city, creating images that convey a sense of the power and energy of industrial machinery and the passion and violence of social change.

Boccioni became part of the movement after meeting Marinetti in Milan early in 1910, after which he joined Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, Carlo Carrà and Luigi Russolo in signing Il manifesto dei pittori futuristi - the Manifesto of Futurist Painters.

Boccioni's The City Rises is considered by many art
historians to be the first true Futurist painting

In the same year, Boccioni completed one of his finest works, entitled La città che sale, which is translated as The City Rises. The painting, which many consider to be the first truly Futurist painting, combines static images of building construction as the background to the scene, but in which the dominant image is of men and horses melded together, the men desperately trying to harness control of the beasts, suggesting a primeval conflict between humanity and beasts in a changing, mechanised world.

Boccioni became the main theorist of the artistic movement but only after he and Severini and other Futurists traveled to Paris in around 1911 and witnessed the Cubism of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso did the movement begin to take real shape.

The influence of this was visible in Boccioni’s La strada entra nella casa - The Street Enters the House - later in 1911, which had geometric elements and the perspectival distortion familiar in Cubism, as the artist sought to create the sensation of the noises and images of the street filling the house on the opening of a window.

The Farewells - part of Boccione's State of Mind series - can
be viewed at the Museum of Modern Art, also in New York

His series Stati d'animo - States of Mind - contained similar geometric features, while La risata - The Laugh - created a scene that is broken apart and distinctly abstracted by a loss of structural borders, in line with the Cubist and Futurist demand that audiences dissect the images seen in everyday life, and notice each piece and its contribution to the whole.

Boccioni also became interested in sculpture. In 1912 he published the Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, in which he advocated the use in sculpture of non-traditional materials such as glass, wood, cement, cloth, and electric lights, and for different materials to be used in combination
in one piece of sculpture.

His most famous work, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), is one of the masterpieces of early modern sculpture. Cast in bronze some years after his death, the piece is seen as an expression of movement and fluidity. It is depicted on the Italian-issue 20 cent euro coin.

Boccione's Dynamism of a Cyclist (1913) is on display
at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice

Boccioni’s father was a government employee whose job required him to make frequent changes of location. Soon after Boccioni’s birth, the family relocated to the north and he and his older sister Amelia grew up largely in Forlì, Genoa and Padua. At the age of 15, in 1897, Boccioni moved with his father to Catania in Sicily, where he would finish school.

In around 1898, he moved to Rome and studied art at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, where he met Gino Severini. Both he and Severini became students of Giacomo Balla, who introduced them to the modern Divisionist technique.

Boccioni’s style at the time leaned towards the neo-impressionist. It was around the time he was in Rome that he produced his 1905 self-portrait, which differs greatly from his Futurism.

After spending time in Paris and Russia, Boccioni moved to Milan in 1907.

Boccione's best-known sculpture is Unique Forms
of Continuity in Space, completed in 2013

In 1914, Boccioni published his book Futurist Painting and Sculpture, the most comprehensive account of Futurist artistic theory written by a founding member.

The following year, enthused by the possibility that the violence of the Great War in Europe would bring about some of the societal change that Futurists advocated, Boccioni - along with Marinetti, Russolo and other Futurists - signed up to fight as a volunteer.

The battalion he had joined disbanded in December 2015 and Boccioni returned to painting.  But in June 1916 he was conscripted to the Italian Army and stationed outside Verona with an artillery brigade.

During a training exercise in August, Boccioni was thrown from his horse and trampled, suffering injuries from which he died at the age of just 33. Many art historians say that with his death Italy’s Futurist movement was effectively at an end.

Piazza Duomo in Reggio Calabria, the city where Umberto
Boccioni was born in 1882

Travel tip:

Reggio Calabria is the oldest city in Calabria, the most important in what became known as Magna Graecia - Great Greece - after settlers began to arrive in the 8th century BC.  A few years after Boccioni left the area, a huge earthquake destroyed large parts of Reggio Calabria, which had to be substantially rebuilt. It is notable now for its fine Liberty buildings and its linear plan.  The best of what could be salvaged of the Greek remains can be seen in the National Archaeological Museum of Magna Graecia, housed in Palazzo Piacentini.

Catania has many Roman ruins, including this amphitheatre
in Piazza Stesicoro, which was buried by an earthquake in 1693

Travel tip:

The city of Catania, where Boccioni completed his education, is located on the east coast of Sicily facing the Ionian Sea. It is one of the 10  biggest cities in Italy, with a population including the environs of 1.12 million. Catania has been virtually destroyed by earthquakes twice, in 1169 as well as 1693, and regularly witnesses volcanic eruptions from nearby Mount Etna.  In the Renaissance, it was one of Italy's most important cultural, artistic and political centres and has enjoys a rich cultural legacy today, with numerous museums and churches, theatres and parks and many restaurants.

More reading:

How Carlo Carrà was applauded for capturing the violence at an anarchist's funeral

Luigi Russolo and the phenomenon of 'noise music'

The Futurist behind the famous conical Campari soda bottles

Also on this day:

1956: The birth of micro-biologist Carlo Urbani, who uncovered the SARS virus

2012: The death of three-times Giro d'Italia winner Fiorenzo Magni


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The death of Giuseppe Garibaldi

Unification hero spent last days on his island off Sardinia

The revolutionary general Giuseppe Garibaldi

The Italian revolutionary and patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi died on this day in 1882 on the Sardinian island of Caprera.

The 74-year-old former military general and left-wing politician, whose Expedition of the Thousand was a major factor in completing the unification of Italy, had spent much of the last 27 years of his life on the island.

Increasingly confined to bed because of crippling arthritis, he was living on his farm with his third wife, Francesca Armosino, when he passed away.

Knowing he was fading, in the days before his death Garibaldi had asked for his bed to be moved close to a window, from which he could gaze at the emerald and sapphire sea.

He has asked for a simple funeral and cremation, and had even nominated the place on the island where he wished his body to be burned, in an open coffin, with his face to the sun.

He had hoped his ashes would be handed over to ordinary Italians, to be mixed with the earth in a place where a garden might grow as a symbol of the new Italy.

Garibaldi with his third wife, Francesca

But his wishes were ignored. His body at first remained in his four-poster bed, guarded by a soldier and a sailor, while a succession of people filed past to pay their respects.

Garibaldi’s body was then placed in a tomb in the gardens of his farmhouse, although his great-granddaughter Anita Garibaldi, named after Giuseppe’s Brazilian first wife, believes his body may have later been removed by supporters eager to honour his wishes and have it cremated.

His association with the island of Caprera goes back to what is thought to have been his first visit in 1849. In 1855 he bought half the island using his legacy from his brother, Angelo.

After the Expedition of the Thousand concluded with his handing over of Sicily and Naples to Victor Emmanuel II in November, 1860, he retired there, although his military campaigning was not over and he made two further attempts to capture Rome for the new Italy.

A depiction of Garibaldi's body after his death

On both occasions, however, in 1862 and 1867, the French support for the Papal army proved too much.  On the second occasion he was arrested and held prisoner and his release was effectively conditional on him going into exile on Caprera.

Garibaldi remains an Italian hero and statues of him stand in many Italian squares and around the world. There is a bust of him directly outside the old Supreme Court Chamber in the US Capitol Building in Washington, DC.

He is even commemorated in Nottingham, England, in the colours worn by the football club Nottingham Forest, whose red shirts were based on the uniform worn by Garibaldi’s followers. Indeed, one of the club’s nicknames is the Garibaldi Reds.

Garibaldi's house is now a museum dedicated to his memory

Travel tip:

The island of Caprera, off the northern tip of the much larger island of Sardinia, was populated in the early days of the Western Roman Empire, as was evidenced by the discovery of the remains of Roman cargo ships there. It was unoccupied for centuries thereafter and the pinewoods that cover the island today began with trees planted by Garibaldi. Today it is a natural reserve for the royal seagull, the cormorant and the peregrine falcon. Garibaldi’s house nowadays is open to the public as a museum.

The harbour at La Maddalena

Travel tip:

The island of La Maddalena, which is connected to Caprera by a causeway, is renowned for its beaches and attracts many wealthy tourists to anchor their yachts in the harbour.  Like Caprera it was deserted for many centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire but began to develop in the late 18^th century when a town of the same name was established under the occupation of the Savoy-Piedmontese kingdom.  The road linking the town’s port area with the central Piazza Umberto is named Via Garibaldi.

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