Pina Menichelli – silent movie star

Screen diva who enjoyed worldwide fame

Pina Menichelli in one of the extravagant
costumes she wore in Il Fuoco

The actress Pina Menichelli, who became one of the most celebrated female stars of the silent movie era, was born on this day in 1890 in Castroreale, a village in northeast Sicily.

Menichelli’s career was brief – she retired at the age of just 34 – but in her last eight or nine years on screen she enjoyed such popularity that her films played to packed houses and she commanded a salary that was the equivalent of millions of euros in today’s money.

Without words, actors had to use facial expressions and body movements to create character in the parts they were playing and Menichelli, a naturally beautiful woman, exploited her elegance and sensuality to the full, at times pushing the limits of what was acceptable on screen.

In fact, one of her films, La Moglie di Claudio (Claudio’s Wife) was banned by the censors for fear it would offend sensitivities, particularly those of the Catholic Church.

Generally cast in the role of femme fatale, Menichelli thus became something of a sex symbol in the years after the First World War and there was considerable shock when she announced abruptly in 1924 that she was quitting the film industry for good.

Born Giuseppa Iolanda Menichelli, she came from a theatrical background.  Her parents, Cesare and Francesca, were touring theatre actors, part of a dynasty of performers that included Nicola Menichelli, an 18^th century comedian. Two sisters and a brother also became actors.

Menichelli and Amleto Novelli in the film Padrone
delle Ferriere directed by Eugenio Perego

She grew up on the road. She went to school in Bologna in northern Italy and joined a theatre company to tour Argentina as a teenager in 1908.

While she was living in Buenos Aires she met and married Libero Pica, an Italian journalist who was based there, and had two sons, the first of whom, sadly, survived only a few days.

Had things worked out differently, her big-screen career might never have happened, but after she became pregnant for a third time the couple separated and she returned to Italy. Her third child, a daughter, was born in Milan in 1912.

In 1913, with the Italian film industry still in its infancy, Menichelli signed up with the Rome studio Cines, and between 1913 and 1915 made 35 movies, graduating from small parts in short films to lead roles in features.

She was climbing the ladder towards fame, having earned favourable comparisons with Lydia Borelli and Francesca Bertini, the most famous Italian actresses of the day, when she moved to Itala Films of Turin, lured there by the director, Giovanni Pastrone, who saw in her the potential to become a star.

Giovanni Pastrone recognised Pina
Menichelli's star potential

He gave her the lead role in a film entitled Il Fuoco (The Fire), about the tempestuous love affair between an aristocratic poet (Menichelli) and an impoverished painter (Febo Mari), which was critically acclaimed and became a global success.

Her next role, as a glamorous Russian countess pursued by an amorous diplomat (Alberto Nepoti), in Pastrone’s Tigre Reale (Royal Tiger), had critics trying to outdo one another in the extravagance of their praise, referring to her “erotic charge, seductive glances and provocative body movements.”

One critic, noting Menichelli's propensity for writhing poses and sudden, dramatic movements, rather unflatteringly dubbed her "Our Lady of the Spasms."

It established Menichelli as the biggest star of all the divas of Italy’s silent movie scene and her salary catapulted almost overnight from around 12,000 lire per year working for Cines to move than 300,000 lire per year at Itala.

In 1919, she took the bold decision to leave Pastrone and Itala Films in order to sign up with Rinascimento Film of Rome, a company set up specifically for her by Baron Carlo d’Amato, who would later become her second husband.

The Italian film industry was beginning to struggle as the economic hardships of the 1920s began to take hold, yet by targeting foreign markets D’Amato was able to buck the trend and Menichelli continued to enjoy success.

La Storia di Una Donna won
critical acclaim for Menichelli

She was also given a platform to show off a different range of acting talents by a director willing to experiment.  His 1920 feature La Storia di Una Donna starred Menichelli as a mystery woman taken unconscious with gunshot wounds to a hospital, where a detective trying to identify her finds a diary telling the story of her life, which is then played out for the audience as a series of extended flashbacks, a technique at the time that was highly unusual.

Menichelli made a total of 13 films for D’Amato, rounding off with a couple of light-hearted comedies before the two were married in 1924, following the death of her first husband, who had always refused to allow their marriage to be annulled.

It was then that she announced she was not only retiring but turning her back on the cinema to the extent that she wished almost to erase it from her life, destroying every photograph, poster and programme she possessed and making it known that approaches from journalists, biographers or cinema historians who might wish to chronicle her career would not be welcome.

Wealthy enough never to have to worry about money, she seemingly wanted nothing but to resume the life of a housewife and mother that was denied to her when she parted acrimoniously from her first husband.  The image of a “vamp”, a femme-fatale, a sex symbol, she felt was incompatible with that of a good wife.

She lived the remainder of her life – another 60 years – out of the spotlight, outliving her husband and dying in relative obscurity in Milan in 1984 at the age of 94.

The hilltop town of Castroreale in Sicily

Travel tip:

Castroreale, where Pina Menichelli was born, is a hilltop village in northeast Sicily about 9km (5.5 miles) inland and 30km (19 miles) southwest of the city of Messina. It is notable for having 80 churches – roughly one for every 35 residents.  Notable among these are the 15^th century Duomo di Santa Maria Assunta, with its Mannerist façade with Baroque and classical decorations, the church of the Candelora on Via Umberto I, which contains a 17^th century wooden altar with carvings attributed to Giovanni Siracusa.  Two art collections, housed in the former church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, and in the Civic Museum, are worth a visit.

The Villa della Regina was a palace of the House of Savoy

Travel tip:

The studios of Itala Film, where Menichelli found fame, were in Via Luisa del Carretto, a street in Turin in the neighbourhood of Gran Madre, a quiet residential area across the Po river from the main part of the city yet only five or 10 minutes from the centre.  Nearby is the Villa della Regina, a 17^th century palace designed by Ascanio Vitozzi for the House of Savoy.

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Elsa Schiaparelli - fashion designer

Clothes inspired by Surrealist art 

Elsa Schiaparelli left Rome in search of
adventure in around 1912

The designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who is regarded along with her rival Coco Chanel as one of the key figures in the fashion world between the two World Wars, was born on this day in 1890 in Rome.

Heavily influenced by the Surrealist cultural movement – the artists Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau were among her collaborators – she became a favourite of some of the world’s most recognisable women, including the American actresses Greta Garbo and Mae West, the German singer and actress Marlene Dietrich, and the socialite and heiress Daisy Fellowes.

Her style shaped the look of fashion in the 1920s and 1930s, often featuring elements of the trompe l’oeil artistic technique to create optical illusions, such as the dress she made with Dali’s collaboration that seemed to be full of rips and tears, or the evening coat she designed with Cocteau that featured two female profiles facing one another which, viewed another way, created the impression of a vase for the fabric roses adorning the shoulders and neck.

Other designs, such as the Lobster Dress and the Skeleton Dress, both influenced by Dali, satisfied her taste for the outrageous.

Schiaparelli was also an innovator.  She was among the pioneers of the wrap dress, she invented the divided skirt – a forerunner of shorts – that the tennis player Lili de Alvarez wore at Wimbledon in 1931, was the first to create designs that included zips in the colour of the fabric and the first to make brooch-like buttons and fasteners.

Schiaparelli's 1938 coat-dress, designed with Jean
Cocteau, is typical of her Surrealist style

She was also the first to come up with the idea of a catwalk show, featuring parading models in artistically designed stage sets with accompanying music.

The colour Shocking pink was her own creation, a shade of magenta inspired by a Cartier diamond owned by Daisy Fellowes.  Originally called Schiaparelli pink, it was first used by her on the packaging for her first fragrance, which she called Shocking, and thereafter became known as Shocking pink.

In fact, there was very little about Schiaparelli’s life that followed conventional patterns.

Born into wealth in Rome, her family home was an apartment in the baroque 18^th century Palazzo Corsini, a sumptuously grand palace in the Trastevere quarter of the city that was once home to royalty and now houses one of Rome’s most important art galleries.

Her mother, Maria-Luisa, was a Neapolitan aristocrat, her father, Celestino Schiaparelli, a prominent scholar and academic who for a while was Dean of the Sapienza University of Rome. His brother, the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, was notable for identifying what for many years were believed to be canals on Mars.

Elsa herself studied at the University but was soon courting controversy, publishing a book of sensual poetry deemed so shocking her parents sent her off to a convent in Switzerland, where she promptly forced them to bring her back to Rome by going on hunger strike.

Schiaparelli's trademark colour, Shocking Pink

She was soon bored with being confined to home, however, finding her lifestyle, while comfortable, to be unfulfilling, and embarked on a series of adventures that took her to London, Paris and New York, where she travelled in the company of a highly unsuitable husband, who called himself Count Wilhelm Frederick Wendt de Kerlor.

They had met in London after she attended a lecture he gave on theosophy, the study of the mystical and the occult, in which she had a fascination. He agreed to help her with her English and a relationship developed. In fact, he was essentially a con-man, passing himself off at various times as a doctor, a lecturer, a detective and criminal psychologist.  Yet he had a charisma she found hard to resist, they were married in 1914 and when he was deported from England in 1915 she followed him to Paris, Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo and eventually New York.

De Kerlor continued his dubious business practices in New York, attracting the attention of the authorities, and the couple both at times feared deportation, Elsa having been suspected of spreading support for Bolshevism among the Italian community. They had a child, Maria-Luisa, known as Gogo, in 1920, after which De Kerlor disappeared, abandoning his new family.

She returned with her daughter to France but went back to New York, having an affair with an opera singer, Mario Laurenti,  before his sudden death in 1922 prompted her to quit America and settle in Paris.

Schiaparelli models the knitted top with the
trompe l'oeil collar that launched her career

Schiaparelli’s career in fashion grew from the need to earn an independent income.  Although she had worked in a fashion boutique in New York, it was only after a friend introduced her to a couturier, Paul Poiret, that the idea of a career in the industry began to have some appeal.

A proposal that she could set up a business selling French haute-couture in New York came to nothing but her time in Poiret’s company allowed her to observe his methods, and she began to design clothes of her own. In 1927, she launched a collection of knitwear featuring the trompe l’oeil touches that would become her hallmark.

The collection was featured in Vogue magazine, after which her order book expanded rapidly. She steadily acquired more clients and added to her range, taking on more staff and opening her first shop, the House of Schiaparelli.

Her reputation grew and grew.  By 1931, an established star and celebrity, she was operating from prestigious premises in Place Vendôme.

Everything changed with the Second World War, however.  Soon after Paris fell to the Germans in 1940, Schiaparelli fled to New York, where she remained until the end of the conflict. After she returned to Paris, with austerity biting hard and other designers catching the eye, the business foundered and she took the decision to close in 1954.

Schiaparelli died in Paris in 1973 and for a while her work was not nearly as well remembered as that of her rival, Chanel. But there has been a revival of interest recently. In 2012, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art featured her work, along with that of Italian designer Miuccia Prada, in a major exhibition.

The Palazzo Corsini was Schiaparelli's home as a young girl

Travel tip:

The Palazzo Corsini, which overlooks the Tiber on Via della Lungara, just across the road from Villa Farnesina, was erected for the Corsini family – the Florentine aristocrats who were represented in the capital by Pope Clement XII (formerly Cardinal Lorenzo Corsini) – on the site of a 15^th-century villa, to a design by the architect Ferdinando Fuga. The villa had previously been the home of Christina, Queen of Sweden, who moved to Rome after abdicating.  The first floor of the palace now houses the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica. Most of the works were donated by the Corsini family and acquired by the state in 1883. It encompasses mainly Italian paintings from the early Renaissance to the late 18^th century, although there is also a Van Dyck and a Rubens. For more information visit www.barberinicorsini.org

The Piazza di Santa Maria in Trastevere

Travel tip:

Trastevere is a charming medieval quarter which is popular with visitors to Rome for its down-to-earth atmosphere and quaint cobbled streets. The central Piazza di Santa Maria has a homely neighbourhood feel, although the Basilica di Santa Maria, which dominates the square, contains some beautifully elaborate golden mosaics by Pietro Cavallini.  Behind the Palazzo Corsini is the University of Rome’s botanical gardens, with more than 7,000 plant species, while the nearby Gianicolo hill, seldom scaled by many tourists on account of a 20-minute climb, offers some of the best views across the city.

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Pietro Mascagni – composer

One opera was enough to build reputation of musician

Pietro Mascagni in 1890, the year his opera
Cavalleria Rusticana, was first played

Pietro Mascagni, the creator of the opera Cavalleria rusticana, died on this day in 1945 in Rome, at the age of 81.

Cavalleria rusticana was an outstanding success when it was first performed in Rome in 1890 and was said to have single-handedly brought the Verismo movement, in which the characters were ordinary people rather than gods, mythological figures or kings and queens, into Italian opera.

The beautiful intermezzo from the opera was used in the sound track of the 1980 film Raging Bull and a production of the opera was used as the setting for the climax of the 1990 film The Godfather Part III, with Michael Corleone’s son Anthony playing Turridu, the opera’s male protagonist. The film ends with the intermezzo playing.

In 2001 Andrea Bocelli recorded a song entitled Mascagni on his Cieli di Toscana album and had an excerpt from Cavalleria rusticana incorporated into the music.

The opera has been so successful that it has led to Mascagni sometimes being dismissed as a one-opera composer, but, in fact, the composer wrote 15 operas, as well as orchestral and piano music and songs.

Two of Mascagni’s other operas, L’amico Fritz and Iris, have remained in the European repertoire and have been regularly performed since their premières.

Mascagni, pictured in 1905

Mascagni was born in Livorno in Tuscany in 1863. He began studying music at the age of 13 and soon produced compositions of his own.

In 1881 he won first prize for a Cantata which was performed at a musical contest in Milan.

The following year, Mascagni passed the admission examination for the Milan Conservatory, where he first met the composer, Giacomo Puccini.

In 1885 Mascagni composed Il Re a Napoli in Cremona, a romance for a tenor and orchestra. Then he left Milan without completing his studies and began touring as an orchestra conductor for opera companies and he also gave piano lessons.

In 1889, a competition was announced for a one-act opera. The following year, Mascagni completed the composition of Cavalleria rusticana and sent the manuscript to Milan.

Cavalleria rusticana won the contest and Mascagni was summoned to Rome to present his opera.  The première was held at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome. It was an outstanding success and was then performed all over Italy. It was also performed in Hungary, Germany, Russia and Argentina and Mascagni became famous internationally.

Listen to Mascagni's most famous piece

Mascagni, who was married in 1889 to Lina Carbognani, with whom he went on to have three children, continued to write music and produce operas and went all over the world conducting orchestras.

Mascagni, centre, at a meeting in 1885 with his fellow
musicians Alberto Franchetti (left) and Giacomo Puccini

By 1915 he was writing music to accompany silent films. In 1930 he conducted La Bohème in Torre del Lago as an homage to Puccini who had died in 1924.

In 1940, celebrations for the 50th anniversary of Cavalleria rusticana took place all over Italy, often with Mascagni conducting the orchestra.

His last opera season was in Rome featuring Cavalleria rusticana and L’amico Fritz, by which time he was so frail he had to conduct sitting on a chair.

Mascagni died on August 2, 1945 in his apartment at The Grand Hotel Plaza in Rome, which had by then been commandeered by the Allies but where he was allowed to remain.

His last years were marred by bitterness at his treatment by the post-Fascist Italian government, who punished him for his support for Mussolini and snubbed his funeral ceremony at Rome’s Cimitero Monumentale on August 4.

However, in 1951 Mascagni’s remains were transferred from Rome to his birthplace, Livorno, and reburied with honours.

The Terrazza Mascagni promenade in Livorno

Travel tip:

Livorno, where Mascagni was born, is the second largest city in Tuscany after Florence. Although it is a large commercial port, it has many attractions, including an elegant sea front, the Terrazza Mascagni, and an historic centre with canals.

Inside the sumptuous Grand Hotel Plaza in Rome

Travel tip:

The Grand Hotel Plaza in Rome, where Mascagni lived in an apartment from 1927 until his death in 1945, is in Via del Corso in the heart of the city. It has beautiful views of Rome from its rooftop terraces. The hotel was remodelled in the 1920s, inspired by the Art Nouveau style in fashion at the time. It has been used as a film location on many occasions.

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Giorgio Morandi – painter

The greatest master of still life in the 20th century

Giorgio Morandi pictured in
his studio in Bologna in 1953

The artist Giorgio Morandi, who became famous for his atmospheric representations of still life, was born on the day in 1890 in Bologna.

Morandi’s paintings were appreciated for their tonal subtlety in depicting simple subjects, such as vases, bottles, bowls and flowers.

He studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna and taught himself to etch by studying books on Rembrandt. Even though he lived his whole life in Bologna, he was deeply influenced by the work of Cézanne, Derain and Picasso.

In 1910 Morandi visited Florence, where the work of Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello also impressed him.

Morandi was appointed as instructor of drawing for elementary schools in Bologna, a position he held from 1914 until 1929. He joined the army in 1915 but suffered a breakdown and had to be discharged.

During the war his paintings of still life became purer in form, in the manner of Cezanne. After a phase of experimenting with the metaphysical style of painting he began to focus on subtle gradations of hue and tone.

Morandi's 1956 painting Natura morta

Morandi became associated with a Fascist-influenced Futurist group in Bologna and was sympathetic to the Fascist Party in the 1920s, although he also had friendships with anti-Fascist figures, which led to him being arrested briefly.

He took part in the Venice Biennale exhibitions, in the Quadriennale in Rome and also exhibited his work in different cities.

He was professor of etching at Accademia di Belle Arti from 1930 until 1956 and was awarded first prize for painting by the 1948 Venice Biennale.

Morandi lived for most of his adult life in Via Fondazza in Bologna with his three sisters until his death from lung cancer in 1964.

He was buried at the Certosa cemetery in Bologna in the family tomb, which bears a portrait of him executed by his friend, the sculptor Giacomo Manzù.

During his life Morandi completed 1350 oil paintings and 133 etchings. He once explained: ’What interests me most is expressing what’s in nature, in the visible world, that is.’

A 1952 still life from Morandi

Morandi is perceived as being one of the few Italian artists of his generation to remain detached from contemporary culture and politics and he is now regarded as one of the best modern Italian painters and the greatest master of still life in the 20th century.

His work has been discussed and written about by many art critics. Director Federico Fellini paid tribute to him in La Dolce Vita, which features his paintings, as does Michangelo Antonioni in La Notte.

The novelists Sarah Hall and Don DeLillo and the poet Ivor Cutler have all written about him. Barack Obama chose two oil paintings by Morandi, which are now part of the White House collection.

A Giorgio Morandi museum - the Museo Morandi - which includes a reconstruction of his studio, was opened in 1993 in Bologna.

Many famous photographers took images of him at his house or in his studio and the interior of his house has been filmed. In 2016 the American photographer Joel Meyerowitz published Morandi’s Object, a book containing his photographs of more than 260 objects that the painter had collected during his life.

Morandi's tomb at the Certosa di Bologna

Travel tip:

The Certosa di Bologna, where Morandi, is buried is a former Carthusian monastery founded in 1334 and suppressed in 1797, located just outside the walls of the city. In 1801 it became the city’s monumental cemetery and would later be praised by Byron in his writings. In 1869 an Etruscan necropolis was discovered there.

Travel tip:

The Museo Morandi, which displays a large collection of works by the painter, is being temporarily housed in the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, which is in Via Don Giovanni Minzoni in Bologna.

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Rachele Mussolini - wife of Il Duce

Marriage survived 30 years despite dictator's infidelity

Rachele Mussolini

Rachele Mussolini, the woman who stayed married to Italy’s former Fascist dictator for 30 years despite his simultaneous relationship with his mistress, Claretta Petacci, and numerous affairs, was born on this day in 1890.

The daughter of Agostino Guidi, a peasant farmer, and Anna Lombardi, she was born, like Benito Mussolini, in Predappio, a small town in what is now Emilia-Romagna.  They met for the first time when the future self-proclaimed Duce had a temporary teaching job at her school.

They were married in December 1915 in a civil ceremony in Treviglio, near Milan, although by that time she had been his mistress for several years, having given birth to his eldest daughter, Edda, in 1910.  Mussolini had actually married another woman, Ida Dalser, in 1914 but the marriage had broken down despite her bearing him a son, Benito junior, and Mussolini returned to Rachele.

Her father had cautioned against her marrying Mussolini, whom he considered to have no prospects, but when Agostino died, his widow became the lover of Mussolini’s father, Alessandro, himself a widower.

Benito and Rachele renewed their vows in a Catholic church in 1925, although it is thought only because Mussolini, by then in power, wanted to curry favour with the pope, Pius XI.

Throughout their marriage, which produced five children – two daughters and three sons – Mussolini liked to present his family as the perfect domestic representation of his Fascist ideal but in truth he spent little time at home.

Claretta Petacci

He began his affair with Petacci, who was 28 years his junior, in around 1932, but there were countless other women, of whom Rachele was fully aware. She even took a lover of her own for a while, which Mussolini knew about but did nothing to stop.

It was only after Mussolini was installed as president of the new Republic of Salò, following his rescue from house arrest in Italy by German paratroopers, that Rachele’s tolerance of his infidelity began to crack.

This was after he insisted on setting up Petacci with a home close to their own, to which she objected strongly, as if she were prepared to turn a blind eye to his indiscretions, so long as she did not have to encounter any of his lovers.

After Mussolini and Petacci were captured by partisans and hung in 1945, Rachele attempted to flee to Switzerland but was herself captured by resistance fighters.  Fortunately for her, they decided against meting out their own justice and handed her over to the Allies.

She was briefly held on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples but soon released, at which she returned to Predappio.

It was through her pleadings with the new Italian government that Mussolini’s body was returned to the village and buried in the family crypt, which then became a place of pilgrimage for neo-fascists.

The Mussolini family crypt in Predappio

Rachele made a living by opening a small restaurant in the village, attracting sympathisers to eat there by selling memorabilia as a sideline.

To anyone who accused her of cashing in on her husband’s notoriety, she would point out that only in 1975, after years of protesting, was she able to draw a state pension, to which she had always been told she was not entitled because Mussolini never actually took a state salary during his time in power.

She died in 1979 at the age of 89.  Before she passed away, she claimed that in 1910 Mussolini, then a journalist, was offered a job on a newspaper in the United States. Because she was pregnant with Edda, however, he turned the offer down.  Had he taken it, the course of Italian history in the 20th century might have been quite different.

Travel tip:

The town of Salò on Lake Garda is now a popular resort, boasting the longest promenade on the lake, some claim in the whole of Italy.  Although its past association with such a divisive figure as Mussolini and his Nazi-sponsored puppet state is not celebrated, it is possible to identify the various buildings he commandeered as government offices.  For example, the town hall – the Palazzo della Magnifica Patria – was an office for interpreters, his propaganda agency, the Agenzia Stefani, was based in a school in Via Brunati, while Mussolini’s guards were said to have been housed in what is now the Bar Italia.  A number of ministries were based in villas overlooking the lake. Mussolini himself lived in the magnificent Villa Feltrinelli, now a luxury hotel, at Gargnano. He installed Claretta Petacci at Villa Fiordaliso, now also a hotel, at Gardone Riviera.

The Basilica of San Martino in Treviglio

Travel tip:

The small city of Treviglio in Lombardy, where Mussolini and his wife Rachele were married, is about 20km (13 miles) south of Bergamo, 41km (26 miles) north-east of Milan. It developed from a fortified town in the early Middle Ages and, having been at times controlled by the French and the Spanish, became part of the Kingdom of Italy in 1860.  Its most visited attraction is the Basilica of San Martino, originally built in 1008 and reconstructed in 1482, with a Baroque façade from 1740, which is in Piazza Manara.



More reading:

The early life of Benito Mussolini

Nazis free Mussolini in Gran Sasso raid

How Mussolini and Petacci were captured and killed

Also on this day:

1987: The death of Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi


(Picture credit: Basilica of San Martino by Giorces via Wikimedia Commons)



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