Pietro Nenni - politician

Pietro Nenni led the Italian Socialist
Party for 22 years in total

Orphan who became influential leader of Italian Socialist Party

The politician Pietro Sandro Nenni, who was a major figure of the Italian left for five decades, was born on this day in 1891 in Faenza in Emilia-Romagna.

Nenni was general secretary of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) on three occasions and rose to high office in the Italian government, twice serving as foreign affairs minister and several times as deputy prime minister, notably under the progressive Christian Democrat Aldo Moro in the centre-left coalitions of the 1960s.

He was a recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize in 1951 but returned the $25,000 that came with the honour in protest at the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

Born into a peasant family, Nenni lost both his parents before he was five years old and grew up in an orphanage, having been placed there by the aristocratic landowners for whom his father had worked.

His experiences there seemed to stir in him a desire to rebel against authority.  He was only nine years old when, on learning of the assassination of King Umberto I by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci, he is said to have written ‘Viva Bresci’ on a wall in the orphanage.

Nenni volunteered to fight for his country
in the First World War

As soon as he was old enough to make his own way in the world he became involved in protest movements. By the age of 16 he was editing a Republican party newspaper in nearby Forlì, where the local Socialist newspaper was edited by Benito Mussolini.  He and Mussolini would become linked when both were arrested and briefly jailed after taking part in a strike against the Italo-Turkish War in Libya.

Both he and Mussolini supported Italy’s entry in the First World War, however. After the conflict, in which Nenni volunteered, was wounded, and returned to frontline service again, their paths diverged.

Both formed fascii - the Italian word in use at the time for political groups - but where Mussolini’s evolved into what would become the National Fascist Party, Nenni’s was soon dissolved. In the same year - 1921 - as Mussolini’s Fascists came into being, Nenni left the Italian Republican Party and joined the PSI, from which a breakaway group had recently left to form the Italian Communist Party (PCI).

Their opposition could not have been more clear when Mussolini was appointed prime minister in 1922 and Nenni, by now editor of the PSI newspaper Avanti!, attacked Mussolini’s ideology on a regular basis.

Mussolini looked for a way to silence Nenni, as he did with most of his political opponents, and he found one in 1925 when Nenni published a booklet whipping up anti-Fascist sentiment following the murder of Socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti.  Mussolini had Nenni arrested for anti-Fascist activity, and though he was soon released it was not long before Avanti!’s offices were damaged in an arson attack and a law brought in to ban its publication.

Nenni served as deputy prime minister in three
governments led by the Christian Democrat Aldo Moro

Nenni fled the country and spent the next 17 years in exile, first in France and then Spain, where he fought on the republican side in the Spanish Civil War as co-founder of the Garibaldi Brigade.  He returned to France in 1943, by then under Nazi occupation, and was arrested by the Germans. He was held first in Vichy but then returned to Italy to continue his imprisonment on the island of Ponza.

After Italy was liberated later in 1943, he was able to resume his political career, his determination to bring about change hardening after learning of the death of his daughter, Vittoria, who had been taken prisoner by the Nazi regime earlier in the Second World War.

He became leader of the PSI and after the surrender of Italy to the Allies became a member of the National Liberation Committee, the political element of the Italian Partisans.  He was deputy prime minister in the interim government of Ferruccio Parri and the first government of Alcide De Gasperi. He became minister for foreign affairs in  the second De Gasperi government, the first administration after Italians voted to make their country a republic in 1946, for which Nenni had been a prominent campaigner.

For several years, the PSI worked closely with the Communists but Nenni broke with them again after Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary, which was an embarrassment to Nenni not only as a recipient of the Stalin Prize but also because he had returned from a meeting with the Russian leader before the invasion and proclaimed Stalin as a man of peace.

As a consequence, Nenni gradually shifted his party’s support away from the Soviet Union in favour of NATO, of which he advocated membership.

After the overwhelming victory of De Gaspari’s Christian Democrats in the divisive 1948 elections, it was not until the 1960s that Nenni’s Socialists were part of government again.  Now a veteran political figure in his 70s, he served as deputy leader under Aldo Moro in three centre-left coalitions that he had helped to broker.

Following poor results in the 1968 elections, Nenni began to release his grip on the PSI and resigned as leader the following year. He was made a senator for life in 1970 but his bid to become President of the Republic in 1971 was unsuccessful. He died in 1980, aged 88.

Faenza's cathedral still has a simple brick facade, and as
such is regarded as an unfinished project

Travel tip:

Faenza is in the Emilia-Romagna region, about 50km (31 miles) southeast of Bologna and 35km (22 miles) southwest of Ravenna. The city is famous for the manufacture of a type of decorative majolica-ware known as faience. It is also home to the International Museum of Ceramics, which has examples of ceramics from ancient times, the Middle Ages and the 18th and 19th centuries as well as displaying work by important contemporary artists. The museum is in Viale Baccarini.  Although the origins of the city go back further, Faenza preserves traces of its Roman rectangular plan, surrounded by 15th-century walls. Notable landmarks include the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, where the city’s cathedral, begun in 1474 by Giuliano da Maiano, can be found. Construction finished in 1515 but was never completed, inasmuch as the front of the building is plain brick, with no stone or marble facade.

Faenza hotels by Booking.com

A Linea A metro train crosses the Ponte Pietro Nenni,
which carries trains over the River Tiber in Rome

Travel tip:

Not all architecture in Rome is classical. One example is the Ponte Pietro Nenni, which spans the Tiber as a link between the Flaminio and Prati districts and is known by many as the Metro Bridge, on account of its primary purpose, which was to carry Linea A of the Rome metro from one side of the river to the other in the only section of the line that is above ground.  It carries vehicular traffic on both sides of the metro tracks. The bridge, a concrete cantilever structure with two supporting V-shaped piles, was designed by the architect Luigi Moretti and the engineer Silvano Zorzi and built between 1969 and 1972. It was inaugurated in 1980 and dedicated to Nenni, who died a month before the inauguration.

Find a hotel in Rome with Booking.com


More reading:

Giuseppe Saragat - the Socialist leader who became president

The kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro

Giacomo Matteotti - the martyr of freedom

Books:

Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks

Also on this day:

1621: Alessandro Ludovisi becomes Pope Gregory XV

1770: The birth of classical guitarist Ferdinando Carulli

1953: The birth of boxer Vito Antuofermo

1953: The birth of missionary Ezechiele Ramin

(Picture credits: Top portrait by senato.it; Faenza cathedral by Tecsis; metro train by Lucaf1; via Wikimedia Commons)

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Gio Ponti - architect and designer

Visionary who shaped more than 100 buildings

The 1956 Pirelli Tower in Milan is one of
Ponti's most famous buildings

Giovanni ‘Gio’ Ponti, one of the most influential architects and designers of the 20th century, was born on this day in 1891 in Milan.

During a career that spanned six decades, Ponti completed more than 100 architectural projects in Italy and abroad and also designed hundreds of pieces of furniture, decorative objects and household items.

As an architect, he made a significant impact on the appearance of his home city. The Pirelli Tower, which for 35 years was Italy’s tallest skyscraper, is the building for which Ponti is most famous, but it is only one of 46 in Milan.

He also designed the Montecatini buildings, the Torre Littoria (now known as the Torre Branca) in Parco Sempione, the San Luca Evangelista church in Via Andrea Maria Ampère, and Monument to the Fallen in Piazza Sant’Ambrogio.

Ponti’s work was by no means confined to Milan, however.  Elsewhere in Italy, he designed the Mathematics Institute at the University of Rome, the Carmelo Monastery in Sanremo, the Villa Donegani in Bordighera, the Gran Madre di Dio Concattedrale in Taranto and the Hotel Parco dei Principi in Sorrento.

Ponti designed 46 buildings in his home city alone
and many more around the world

Outside Italy, he worked on projects in 12 countries. Notable Ponti buildings around the world include the Denver Art Museum in the United States, the Ministries Building in Islamabad, Pakistan, and the the Villa Planchart in Caracas, Venezuela.

Ponti also worked for 120 different companies as a designer, creating designs for furniture and household objects that included the Superleggera chair for the furniture maker Cassina, which combined strength with ‘super light weight’.  Made from ash wood, it weighed only 1.7kg (3.75lb).

After a classical schooling in Milan, Ponti enrolled in at the Faculty of Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano but his studies were interrupted by the First World War, in which he served with some distinction. Reaching the rank of captain, he received the Bronze Medal and the Italian Military Cross. He also painted watercolours of his companions in arms, and while based in the Veneto was able to observe the architecture of Palladio.

Once he finally did graduate, he married his girlfriend, Giulia Vimercati, with whom he had four children - Lisa, Giovanna, Giulio and Letizia.

Ponti's North Building at the Denver Art Museum
in Colorado had a castle-like appearance

Ponti began his architectural career in partnership with Mino Fiocchi and Emilio Lancia, at which time he was influenced by the Milanese neoclassical Novecento Italiano movement.  The first building he designed in his own right was the house in Via Giovanni Randaccio in the Sempione district of central Milan, where he also lived.

He co-founded in 1928 the magazine Domus, of which as editor he would oversee some 560 issues, in all of which he wrote at least one article.  As an academic, he delivered lectures in 24 countries.

The 1930s were years of intense activity for Ponti.  During this time, he shifted towards Modernism with the Borletti funeral chapel and houses in Via de Togni, via Letizia and via del Caravaggio that were designed for the Milanese bourgeoisie, the Torre Littoria and the Rasini Building. He designed the San Michele hotel on Capri and a building for the Faculty of Arts at the University of Pavia.

In the 1950s he was involved in projects as diverse as urban planning in Milan, as the city began a period of intense redevelopment of areas bombed during the Second World War, and designing the interiors of ocean liners.

The Concattedrale Gran Madre di Dio in Taranto in the
south of Italy, built in 1970

After a period working in Brazil and Venezuela, he began his acknowledged masterpiece, the Pirelli Tower in Milan, in 1956, working with another great Italian architect, Pier Luigi Nervi.  Rising to a height of 127m (417ft), it was among the first skyscrapers to abandon the customary block form, Ponti designing a futuristic slender shape with tapered sides drawing to a point at each end, which viewed from above would resemble the outline of a ship. It was hailed as a symbol of corporate success and an optimistic catalyst for economic prosperity.

In the 1960s he built the Milan churches of San Francesco and of San Carlo Borromeo, before turning his attention away from Latin America to the East he built his ministerial buildings in lslamabad and a villa for the businessman Daniel Koo in Hong Kong.

Even as he approached the age of 80, Ponti was still making his mark. He designed his Cathedral in Taranto when he was 79 and had turned 80 when he produced his iconic design for the seven-storey castle-like North Building of the the Denver Art Museum in Colorado.

Ponti died in 1979 at the age of 87 in his eighth-floor apartment in the Via Giuseppe Dezza, where he and his family had lived since 1957 and which reflected all of the ideas with regard to layout, walls, furniture and objects that he had developed during the 1950s.

The Castello Aragonese in Taranto stands guard
over the entrance to the port's harbour

Travel tip:

The city of Taranto, where Ponti’s modern cathedral is considered one of his major works, sits on the inside of the heel of southern Italy. A major naval base, it has a spectacular setting between a sweeping bay and the Mare Piccolo, an inland sea. One of the biggest cities in pre-Roman Europe, contemporary Taranto is a city of two distinct parts – a somewhat crumbling centro storico on a small island protecting the lagoon, and new city of wide avenues laid out in a formal grid. In the 1930s Mussolini had a quarter of the ancient centre demolished to build apartment blocks, and it was badly bombed in the Second World War. The old city - the Città Vecchia - contains a castle built by Ferdinand of Aragon in 1492, behind which are the ruins of an ancient sixth century BC Doric temple. The city’s original cathedral, which dates from 1070, has been remodelled with a Baroque façade.

The beautiful green space of the Parco Sempione in
Milan, looking towards the Arch of Peace

Travel tip:

Parco Sempione is a large park in Milan, with an overall area of 38.6 hectares (95 acres), located in the historic centre of the city. The adjacent to the gardens of the Sforza Castle and to the Arch of Peace, two of the main landmarks of Milan. A third prominent monument of Parco Sempione is the Palazzo dell'Arte, built in 1933 and designed by Giovanni Muzio. Also in the park are the Arena Civica, the public aquarium, and the Torre Branca tower, which used to be known as the Torre Littoria, a 108.6m (356ft) metal structure with a viewing platform at the top.

More reading:

From football stadiums to churches: The work of Pier Luigi Nervi

How Marco Zanuso put Italy at the forefront of contemporary style

The brilliance of Renzo Piano, designer of the Pompidou Centre and the Shard

Also on this day:

1626: The consecration of St Peter's Basilica in Rome

1630: The birth of Holy Roman Empress Eleonora Gonzaga

1804: The birth of soldier and former Italian PM Alfonso Ferrero La Marmora


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Giovanni Buitoni - entrepreneur

Turned family business into multinational company

Giovanni Buitoni took over the running of
the family business when he was just 18 

Giovanni Buitoni, the entrepreneur who turned Buitoni pasta and Perugina chocolates into the international brands they are today, was born on this day in 1891 in Perugia.

The Buitoni family had been making pasta since 1827, when Giovanni’s great grandmother, Giulia, opened a small shop in the Tuscan town of Sansepolcro, in order to support the family after her husband, Giovan Battista Buitoni, had become ill.  She had her own recipe for pasta that used only high quality durum wheat.

Giulia had pawned her wedding jewellery in order to set up the shop but the business did so well that in 1856 two of the couple’s nine children, Giuseppe and Giovanni, opened a factory in Città di Castello, just over the border in northern Umbria, to manufacture pasta using a hard durum wheat they sourced in Puglia.

Giovanni’s sons, Antonio and Francesco, continued the company’s expansion, founding manufacturing plants in other towns, including Perugia.

It was in Perugia in 1907 that Francesco, noting the increasing popularity of chocolate, joined with several partners in launching the Perugina confectionary company.

Baci chocolates have been one of the most famous
lines made by the Perugina chocolate company

Giovanni junior’s destiny was probably always to have a role in the family business, although it came rather sooner than he expected.  After studying law he had gone to Germany in 1909 to learn the language and to observe the way German industries operated, their practises being somewhat advanced compared with Italy’s.

He curtailed his trip on receiving news that his father’s Perugina chocolate company was on the brink of bankruptcy. Already bursting with ideas for improving business, he persuaded his father to let him take over general management of the company at just 18 years old and succeeded in turning it into a profit-making concern.

Within only a short time, Perugina had expanded from a small basement operation to large factory with hundreds of workers. He installed modern machinery in the plant and introducing new products, among them the famous Baci -‘kisses' - chocolates still produced today, each containing a love note, which were the idea of Luisa Spagnoli, one of his father’s partners - and Giovanni's clandestine lover at the time - who went on to become famous in the fashion industry.

The Buitoni name has been visible in Italian shops since
1827, when the first Buitoni store opened in Sansepolcro

Giovanni even managed to combine running the company with a brief stint in the Italian Army in the First World War and later completing his doctor of law degree at the University of Perugia.

Always an innovator, he increased sales of Buitoni pasta products even in the Great Depression of 1930s by putting picture cards inside each packet for customers to collect. Customers who collected complete sets of the cards were eligible to take part in a radio contest and win prizes, including a FIAT automobile.

Giovanni Buitoni was by now an individual of some stature in Perugia, whose citizens he served as Podesta - mayor - from 1930 to 1935. In 1936, he married the opera singer, Letizia Cairone.

Letizia Cairone married
Buitoni in 1936

Buitoni’s expansion into production outside Italy came almost through a twist of fate.

In 1939, Giovanni and his wife were invited by the Hershey Chocolate Company, who were holding a 30th anniversary celebration at their headquarters in Pennsylvania, to visit the United States.

They also attended the 1939 World’s Fair to New York City to promote their own products. With his typical entrepreneurial vision, having noted how much visitors were being asked to pay for food, Giovanni opened a pop-up spaghetti café on the site, selling plates of pasta dressed in simple sauces at 25 cents each.  He and Letizia cooked about 15,000 portions over the course of the event.

They found the American lifestyle to their liking and stayed on for a while afterwards. Unfortunately, before they could return to Italy the Second World War broke out, and once Italy had declared war on the side of the Germans, Giovanni and Letizia were unable to travel or access their money.

With no option but to stay and fend for themselves, Letizia followed the lead of Giovanni’s great grandmother and pawned her jewellery, enabling Giovanni to find a small premises in which to open a pasta factory in New Jersey.

Thanks in part to his vision in promoting the Buitoni name at the World’s Fair, the brand began to sell.  Within 15 years, the Buitoni Foods Corporation had a much bigger factory in South Hackensack, New Jersey and later another one in Brooklyn. A spaghetti restaurant in Times Square, New York City, followed, along with a Perugina shop on Fifth Avenue.

Carlo De Benedetti sold the Buitoni business to
Nestlé for $1.4 billion in 1987

Giovanni returned to Italy in 1953 to found the International Buitoni Organization to coordinate all the industrial activities of the family-controlled multinational, but he continued to spend long periods in the United States.

A gifted amateur basso profundo, he was able to realise one of his dreams during his stay in the United States, to sing opera at Carnegie Hall in New York. He invited family, friends and employees to make an audience and, with the help of professional singers Licia Albanese, a soprano, and the baritone Anselmo Colzani, sang arias from Don Giovanni, Rigoletto and Ernani.

Giovanni Buitoni retired from the operational management of the Buitoni group in 1966. He and Letizia had no children and his nephew, Marco Buitoni, succeeded him as president and chief operating officer. Giovanni died in Rome in January 1979.

The business was sold in 1985 to the industrialist Carlo De Benedetti, who owned Olivetti and the newspaper La Repubblica among other things. He in turn sold it for $1.4 billion to its current owner, Nestlé.

The Fontana Maggiore in Perugia's Piazza IV Novembre

Travel tip:

Perugia, the capital of the Umbria region, is an ancient city that sits on a high hilltop midway between Rome and Florence. In Etruscan times it was one of the most powerful cities of the period.  It is also a university town with a long history, the University of Perugia having been founded in 1308.  The presence of the University for Foreigners and a number of smaller colleges gives Perugia a student population of more than 40,000.  The centre of the city, Piazza IV Novembre, has a medieval fountain, the Fontana Maggiore, which was sculpted by Nicolo and Giovanni Pisano.

A view across the rooftops of Sansepolcro

Travel tip:

Sansepolcro is a town of 16,000 inhabitants situated about 38km (24 miles) northeast of Arezzo in the east of Tuscany, close to the borders with Umbria and Marche. The historic centre is entirely surrounded with fortified walls, built in the early part of the 16th century. The centre of the town is the Piazza Torre di Berta, named after the 13th-century tower of the same name, off which can be found the impressive Palazzi Pichi and Giovagnoli and the 14th-century cathedral, dedicated to St John the Evangelist.  The city is famous as the place in which the brilliant early Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca was born and died.

More reading:

Michele Ferrero, the man who invented Nutella

Mario Pavesi, the biscuit-maker who gave Italy the Autogrill

Anselmo Colzani and his 16 seasons at The Met

Also on this day:

1835: The birth of pioneer criminologist Cesare Lombroso

2007: The death of author and journalist Enzo Biagi

Vino Novello - Italy's 'nouveau' - goes on sale


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Luigi Olivari – flying ace

First World War pilot claimed 19 victories

Luigi Olivari was only 25 when he was killed
in a crash near Udine

Lieutenant Luigi Olivari, a pilot in the military aviation corps of the Royal Italian Army who was decorated with a string of awards for valour in action, was born on this day in 1891 in La Spezia, the maritime city on the coast of what is now Liguria.

Olivari became a proficient aerial duellist, claiming to have downed 19 enemy aircraft as Italian planes took on Austro-Hungarian opponents after Italy had joined the war on the side of the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia.

Only eight of these were confirmed, yet Olivari was awarded four silver and two bronze medals for valour by the Italian government, as well as the French Croix de guerre and the Serbian Order of the Star of Karadorde.

The last of his silver medals was awarded posthumously after he was killed on October 13, 1917 when his Spad VII aircraft stalled and crashed during take-off at the Santa Caterina airfield just outside Udine in northwest Italy.

Born to middle-class parents in La Spezia, as a boy he moved with his family to Turin.

A Spad VII similar to the one flown by Luigi Olivari

A good all-round sportsman and an accomplished motorcyclist, Olivari entered the school for civil pilots at Mirafiori, just outside Turin, and obtained his Aero Club’s pilots licence on November 27, 1914.

In May 1915, the week before Italy entered the war, Olivari applied for military pilot's training. He qualified in June and in January 2016 was assigned to fly in the 1a Squadriglia (later redesignated as 70a Squadriglia). 

He scored his first confirmed aerial victory on April 7 - only the second success in the air for Italy – having claimed an earlier success that went unconfirmed.

In September 1916, Olivari was commissioned as a Sottotenente - sub-lieutenant. By April 1917, he was specifically assigned two aircraft—a Spad VII and a Nieuport 17 ser. no. 3127.

In May 1917, he was transferred to the newly formed fighter squadron 91a Squadriglia and than loaned to 77a Squadriglia for about a month. He was subsequently promoted to Tenente and assigned as an Ansaldo SVA.5 test pilot for the Technical Directorate.

Olivari won many awards for valour and claimed to have
shot down 19 enemy aircraft

In February 1919, some 16 months after his death, the Bongiovanni military intelligence commission issued its final determination of Italian aerial victories during the First World War. Olivari's score was cut to eight confirmed victories. Notable for their exclusion were some victories that were noted in Olivari's award citations.

The Ghedi Air Force base, near Brescia, home of the Regia Aeronautica 6th Stormo (6th Wing) was named in his memory after the war.

There are streets named after Luigi Olivari in San Maurizio Canavese, near Turin’s airport, and in the Ligurian city of Genoa.

Piazza Garibaldi in La Spezia

Travel tip:

Overshadowed by its chic neighbours in the Cinque Terre, the port town of La Spezia, home to Italy's largest naval base, tends to be overlooked as a travel destination but offers an affordable alternative base for touring the area, although it is worth inclusion anyway. Nowadays, it is one of Italy’s busiest ports, yet the narrow streets of the old city are deeply atmospheric and have plenty to interest visitors, with a wealth of good restaurants showing off the best Ligurian cuisine.

Travel tip:

Santa Caterina near Udine is best known as the original site of one of the oldest fairs in Italy, which began in 1380 to honour Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who was supposedly beheaded by the Romans for not sacrificing animals to the gods.  Since 1485 the fair has been held within the city walls, in Piazza I Maggio in the municipality of Pasian di Prato.  It is held every year from around November 25 with an array of stalls, although the fairground rides that accompanied it from the mid-1980s have now been moved to the Friuli stadium.

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Stefano Magaddino - mafioso

Longest-ruling Mafia boss in US history

Stefano Magaddino ran the Buffalo crime
family for more than half a century

Stefano Magaddino, the Sicilian mafioso who went on to enjoy the longest period of power enjoyed by any crime boss in the history of the American Mafia, was born on this day in 1891 in Castellammare del Golfo.

Known as ‘The Undertaker’ or ‘Don Stefano’, Magaddino controlled a crime empire radiating outwards from Buffalo, on the shores of Lake Erie in New York State.  Geographically, it was a vast area, stretching from the eastern fringe of  New York State to its western outposts in Ohio and extending north-east almost as far as Montreal in Canada, its tentacles reaching across the Canadian border from Buffalo even into Toronto.

One of the original members of The Commission, the committee of seven crime bosses set up in 1931 to control Mafia activity across the whole of the United States, Magaddino was head of the Buffalo Family for more than half a century.

He died in 1974 at the age of 82, having survived all the other Commission members, including the founder Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano and Chicago boss Al Capone, with the exception of his cousin from Castellammare, Joseph Bonanno, who along with Luciano, headed one of the Five Families of the New York underworld.

Magaddino never knew any life other than crime.  The third of eight children born to Giovanni and Giuseppa Ciaravino Magaddino, he was born in the midst of a feud between his family and their rivals in Castellammare, the Buccellato family.

He had strong links with the Bonanno family in Sicily, joining forces with Joe’s father, Salvatore, in 1899 after the latter’s brothers, Stefano and Giuseppe, were killed on an order given by Felice Buccellato.

New York boss Charles 'Lucky' Luciano
included Magaddino in The Commission

Bonanno and Magaddino took their revenge by ordering the killing of two members from the Buccellato family. A peace was brokered in 1905, before Salvatore Bonanno emigrated to the United States, to be followed, in 1909, by Magaddino. They settled in a Castellammarese colony in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.

The feud followed Magaddino to New York, however, leading to the killing of his brother by Camillo Caiozzo, a member of the Buccellato clan, in an ambush outside a Brooklyn department store. Caiozzo was himself soon killed and in 1921 Magaddino was arrested in Avon, New Jersey on suspicion of his murder.

At the time Magaddino was an influential member of the increasingly powerful Castellammarese clan but when charges against him failed to stick he took the opportunity to relocate to the Buffalo-Niagara Falls area.

There he laid down the beginnings of his empire.  Behind the front of running a funeral home – the Magaddino Memorial Chapel – in Niagara Falls, he set up a profitable Prohibition era business bootlegging wines and spirits across the Niagara River to supply the proliferation of so-called speakeasies in Buffalo.

After Prohibition was ended, Magaddino and his associates moved into loan sharking, illegal gambling, narcotics, extortion, carjacking and labour racketeering, gaining control too of lucrative legitimate businesses such as taxi companies and the laundry and linen services essential to the area’s many hotels.

In the traditional manner of Sicilian Mafiosi, he gave the impression of living a relatively modest lifestyle, doing his utmost to stay in the background and draw as little attention as possible to his criminal activities.

Joseph Bonanno, with whom
Magaddino shared his roots

He was admired by other gang bosses for the success he had in controlling such a large area, while the remoteness of his territory enabled him to remain untouched by the periodic squabbles between the New York families. He was at times called on to an arbitrate in disputes.

He survived a number of attempts on his life.  In 1936, his sister was killed by a bomb intended for him but placed in the wrong house and in 1957 a grenade was thrown through his kitchen window but failed to explode.  The second of those episodes was linked to the so-called Apalachin Conference, a meeting of Mafia bosses at a small town in New York State.

The meeting had been arranged by Magaddino and when it was raided by FBI agents, resulting in the arrest of several mobsters, there were suspicions that he had tipped them off himself as a way of eliminating a few of his rivals.

Later, the respect he enjoyed among his peers diminished when he and his son, Peter, were hauled in by police on charges of illegal bookmaking after a 1968 raid on his son’s home in Niagara Falls, which found around $500,000 in a suitcase.

This aroused more disquiet among senior figures in the Buffalo Family, suspecting him of skimming off profits, and rival groups began to emerge.  Within a year, Magaddino had been ousted as boss, replaced first by Salvatore Pieri and ultimately by Samuel Frangiamore, who had been joint leaders of a breakaway faction.

Magaddino managed to avoid significant spells in jail throughout his rule.  The illegal bookmaking charges, based on a six-year long wire-tapping operation at the funeral home in Niagara, were dropped after a judge ruled the evidence had been obtained illegally.

He was named in Rome in 1967 as the head of a narcotics smuggling ring that had trafficked about $150 million worth of heroin between Europe and the United States between 1950 and 1960 but was never extradited.  He died in 1974 following a heart attack. 

Castellammare del Golfo enjoys a fine location on the
coast of northwest Sicily

Travel tip:

Castellammare del Golfo is a resort and fishing town situated on a large bay in the northwest corner of Sicily, midway between Trapani and Palermo.  It has an attractive setting, guarding over a broad sweep of water and with steep lanes of houses climbing the hillside from the harbour towards the elevated Piazza Petrolo.  A popular backdrop for TV dramas, including some episodes of the Inspector Montalbano series, it has the remains of a castle probably built at the time of the ninth-century Arab occupation of the town, and a good selection of bars and restaurants.

The Basilica of Maria SS Annunziata

Travel tip:

Trapani is a city of some 70,000 inhabitants on a coastal plain around 100km (62 miles) west of Palermo, at the very western tip of the island. Renowned for its seafood, it has a nearby airport but is not well known among overseas tourists, yet offers an attractive base for visitors, with the impressive Basilica-Sanctuary of Maria Santissima Annunziata and a 14^th-century cathedral among its attractions. The city is also famous for the Easter Processione dei Misteri di Trapani, a day-long celebration of the Passion.

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Antonio Segni - prime minister and president

Sardinian politician famous for tactical cunning

Antonio Segni: Christian Democrat was
twice Italian prime minister

Antonio Segni, the first Sardinian to become Italy's prime minister, was born on this day in 1891 in Sassari, the second largest city on the island.

Sassari was also the home town of another Italian prime minister, Francesco Cossiga, and of the country's most successful Communist leader, Enrico Berlinguer.  Like Segni, Cossiga also served the country as president.

Born into a landowning family and a prominent member of the Christian Democratic party from the time of its formation towards the end of the Second World War, Segni was prime minister from 1955 to 1957 and from 1959 to 1960. He was president from 1962 until he was forced to retire due to ill health in 1964.

Frail in appearance for much of his life, Segni was a strong politician nonetheless, given the affectionate nickname Il malato di ferro - the invalid with the iron constitution - by his supporters.

He was also highly astute, particularly when it came to wrong-footing opponents.

Segni became politically active in his late 20s, joining the Italian People's Party (PPI) - predecessor of the Christian Democrats - in 1919 and by 1924 was a member of the party's national council. He spoke out against extremism on the left and the right and opposed PPI participation in any coalition involving the Fascists.

Alcide de Gasperi led Italy's first government as
a republic after the end of the Second World War

In 1926, the debate became irrelevant as Fascist leader Benito Mussolini banned all political organisations apart from his own and for the next 17 years Segni, who had graduated with a degree in agricultural and commercial law, returned to academic life, lecturing in agrarian law at a number of universities.

He resumed his political career in 1943 - the year in which Mussolini was thrown out by his own party and arrested by King Victor Emmanuel III - helping launch the Christian Democratic Party in Sardinia.  He was part of the wartime governments of Ivanoe Bonimi, Ferrucio Parri and Alcide de Gasperi before being elected to the first parliament of the new Italian Republic, serving as Minister for Agriculture, also under De Gasperi.

It was in that capacity that Segni showed himself to be an innovative thinker in political tactics.  Aware that agricultural workers, still living in a somewhat medieval societal structure dominated by large landowners, were a prime target for left-wing revolutionaries, Segni sought to keep them onside by proposing that areas of uncultivated land should be expropriated from large landowners and given to the workers so that they could grow and sell their own produce.

He was prepared to lose substantial amounts of his own land under the scheme.  In the event, the proposal met with opposition both from the right, who objected to any imposed limitations on property ownership, and from the left, who saw it as a calculated attempt to undermine their support from agricultural workers.  Nonetheless, the watered down version that was passed still led to some 121,000 working class families becoming landowners.

Giovanni de Lorenzo was the head
of Italy's Carabinieri police force

As prime minister, Segni introduced other social reforms to the benefit of ordinary Italians, particularly in the area of pensions, and in insurance against health problems linked to working conditions.

Later, however, it was alleged that his tactics for keeping the left from gaining power in Italy were not always so honourable.

In 1967, after an investigation by the news magazine L'Espresso, it was claimed that, as president, Segni was so uneasy about the growing popularity of the Italian Socialist and Communist parties he had asked General Giovanni de Lorenzo, the head of the Carabinieri - Italy's quasi-military police force - to work with the Italian secret services and the CIA to prepare a coup.

This supposedly would have involved 20,000 Carabinieri officers on the streets around the country, 5,000 of them in Rome, who would occupy government buildings such as the Palazzo del Quirinale, the offices of the television and radio stations, plus the headquarters premises of the Communist and Socialist parties and the Communist party newspaper, L'Unità.  Leaders and prominent supporters of the Communist party were to be detained and interned at a secret base in Sardinia already used by the clandestine anti-Communist organisation, Gladio.

The existence of the plot was never proved.  It was suggested in some quarters that the story was a plant by the right aimed at dissuading progressive Christian Democrats such as Aldo Moro from entering into coalition deals with left-wing parties; others dismissed the story as an attempt by L'Espresso to discredit De Lorenzo, who was a member of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement.

Segni stepped down as president in December 1964, four months after suffering a cerebral haemorrhage.  He died in Rome in 1972 at the age of 81.

Travel tip:

Sassari, the origins of which can be traced to the early 12th century, is a city rich in art, culture and history. It is well known for its beautiful palazzi, for the Fountain of the Rosello, and for the elegant neoclassical architecture that can be found around the central Piazza d'Italia and the Teatro Civico. The city - second in size on Sardinia only to Cagliari - is not heavily industrialised, its economy mainly reliant on tourism and the service industries.

Palazzo Madama is the seat of Italy's Senate

Travel tip:

Rome's four main government buildings can be found within a short distance from one another in the centre of the city.  The prime minister's official residence and cabinet office are in Palazzo Chigi in Piazza Colonna, just off Via del Corso.  The Palazzo Montecitori, where Italy's lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, convenes, is little more than 150m from Palazzo Chigi in the Piazza di Monte Citori.  Approximately 600m from Palazzo Chigi, going west, and a stone's throw from Piazza Navona, the upper house, the Senate, sits in Palazzo Madama, which can be found in Piazza Madama. The official residence of the Italian president is the Palazzo del Quirinale, or simply il Quirinale, which is roughly 800m from Palazzo Chigi in the opposite direction.  Sitting atop one of Rome's seven hills, it is often referred to also as il Colle – the Hill.

More reading:

Alcide de Gasperi - the Christian Democrat founder who had been jailed by Mussolini

How Enrico Berlinguer turned Italy's Communist Party in a political force

Why the Aldo Moro tragedy overshadowed career of Francesco Cossiga

Also on this day:

1594: The death of composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

1723: The death of anatomist Antonio Maria Valsalva

1925: The birth of Olympic showjumper Raimondo D'Inzeo

(Picture credit: Palazzo Madama by Paul Hermans; via Wikmedia Commons)


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Pier Luigi Nervi - architect

Striking designs from football stadiums to churches

The architect Pier Luigi Nervi

The brilliant structural engineer and architect Pier Luigi Nervi was born on this day in 1891 in Sondrio, an Alpine town in northern Lombardy at the heart of the Valtellina.

Nervi made his mark with a number of strikingly original designs at home and abroad and was noted both for his innovative use of reinforced concrete and his multi-dimensional designs, which enabled him to create structures that were both strong and elegant.

His major works in Italy include the Palazzo del Lavoro in Turin, the bell tower of the Chiesa del Sacro Cuore in Florence and the Papal Audience Hall at the Vatican City, as well as a number of important sports facilities.

The Stadio Artemio Franchi (formerly the Stadio Communale) in Florence - home of the Fiorentina football club - was one of his first important projects and he designed several stadia for the Rome Olympics in 1960, including the Stadio Flaminio and the Palazzo dello Sport EUR.

Around the world, the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, the George Washington Bridge Bus Station in New York, the Stock Exchange Tower in Montreal, St Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco and the Italian Embassy in Brasilia are among Nervi's legacy.

The son of a postmaster, Nervi graduated from the School of Civil Engineering in Bologna in 1913.

The Stadio Artemio Franchi in Florence

After serving in the Italian army's Corps of Engineering in the First World War, Nervi established his own firm in Rome in 1923. His first all-concrete building was the Augusteo Cinema-Theatre on the Vomero hill in Naples, built in 1927.

It was the stadium in Florence that established his reputation. Opened in 1931, it was built entirely of reinforced concrete and featured a 70-metre (230 feet) tower and a ground-breaking cantilevered roof over the main grandstand.

In 1932 Nervi and a cousin in Rome formed the contracting firm of Nervi and Bartoli and in 1935 they were commissioned to build aircraft hangars for the Italian air force after Nervi's designs won a national competition.

Between 1935 and 1941 he built eight hangars in Orbetello and Torre del Lago in Tuscany and Orvieto in Umbria and was said to be distraught when all eight were blown up by the retreating German army in 1944.

Having worked with a team of architects and engineers on the UNESCO building in Paris, Nervi returned to Italy to work alongside Gio Ponti in helping to create the country's first skyscraper office building, the distinctively tapered 32-storey Pirelli Tower in Milan, which stood at 127 metres (417 feet) and remained the tallest building in Italy from 1958 until 1995.

It was the first of four skyscapers Nervi helped designed around the world.  He was also involved with the 190-metre 48-storey Stock Exchange Building in Montreal and worked with the Australian architect Harry Seidler on the Australia Square Tower and the MLC Centre in Sydney.

The dome of Nervi's Cathedral of St Mary in San Francisco

Nervi's design for the George Washington Bridge Bus Station in Manhattan, famous for the butterfly-like wings of concrete that make up its roof, helped him acquire fame in America, where in 1964 he was awarded that country's highest architectural accolade, the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects.

His work in the United States also included the Cathedral of St Mary of the Assumption in San Francisco, notable for its distinctive multi-dimensional dome. Religious buildings to which he contributed in Italy include the concrete bell tower, reminiscent of a pithead or perhaps the framework for a helter-skelter, of the Sacro Cuore church in Florence, and the vast, 10,000-capacity Papal Audience Hall at the Vatican, with its undulating roof.

Nervi's sons, Antonio, a structural engineer, and Mario, an architect, followed him into the family business as he began to wind down his workload.  Alongside his work, he was a professor of engineering at Rome University from 1946 to 1961 and at Harvard from 1961 to 1962.

He died in Rome in 1979 aged 87.

A panorama of the Alpine town of Sondrio

Travel tip:

Sondrio is a small town of around 22,000 people, a base for skiing in the Alps during the winter but famous also for its terraced vineyards producing notable wines such as Sassella and Grumello.  Built on what was originally the site of a Roman military camp, Sondrio is one of the main towns in the Valtellina, a valley that was once an important pass between Italy and Germany.  At the heart of the town is the charming Piazza Garibaldi.

Travel tip:

Two examples of Nervi's work, the Stadio Flaminio and the Palazzetto dello Sport, can be found next to one another in the Flaminio district of Rome, around seven kilometres from the centre.  The Stadio Flaminio has traditionally been the home of the Italian rugby team and is currently undergoing refurbishment.

More reading:

How Marco Zanuso put Italy at the forefront of style

The man behind the Royal Palace in Caserta

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Giannina Arangi-Lombardi – opera singer

Soprano’s superb voice was captured in early recordings

Giannina Arangi-Lombardi

Soprano Giannina Arangi-Lombardi was born on this day in 1891 in Marigliano near Naples in Campania.

She studied singing at the Conservatory of San Pietro a Majella in Naples and made her debut on the stage in Rome in 1920. Arangi-Lombardi sang mezzo-soprano roles for the next three years at theatres in Rome, Sicily, Parma, Florence and Naples.

She then underwent further study and returned to the stage as what is known as a spinto soprano, a singer who can reach the high notes of the lyric soprano but can also achieve dramatic climaxes with her voice.

Arangi-Lombardi’s second debut, this time as a soprano, was in 1923. The first time she sang the role of Aida in Verdi's opera of the same name the audience was stunned by her voice and her fame quickly spread.

She appeared on stage at Teatro alla Scala in Milan for the first time in 1924 singing Elena in Boito’s Mefistofele. The orchestra for her debut performance was conducted by Arturo Toscanini.

She sang regularly at La Scala until 1930 and appeared at many other opera houses in Europe as well as in South America.

She took part in Dame Nellie Melba’s farewell tour of Australia in 1928, when she sang the title role in the Australian premiere of Puccini’s Turandot.

After retiring from the stage in 1938 Arangi-Lombardi taught at the music conservatory in Milan and then later became director of the music conservatory in Ankara in Turkey.

Arangi-Lombardi died in Milan in 1951 a few weeks after celebrating her 60th birthday.

Her voice can still be heard today in the recordings she made of full length operas between 1929 and 1931.

Teatro alla Scala in Milan

Travel tip:

La Scala in Milan, where Arangi-Lombardi appeared regularly, has a fascinating museum that displays costumes and memorabilia from the history of opera. The entrance is in Largo Ghiringhelli, just off Piazza Scala. It is open every day except the Italian Bank Holidays and for a few days when it is closed in December. Opening hours are from 9.00 to 12.30 and 1.30 to 5.30 pm.

Travel tip: 

Milan’s Conservatory of Music (Conservatorio di Musica ‘Giuseppe Verdi’) is in Via Conservatorio, just off Via Pietro Mascagni, behind the Duomo and just a short walk from Teatro alla Scala. 

Read more:

Cecilia Bartoli renowned for interpretations of Rossini and Mozart

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Vittorio Jano - motor racing engineer

Genius behind the success of Alfa Romeo, Lancia and Ferrari

Vittorio Jano

Born on this day in 1891, Vittorio Jano was among the greatest engine designers in motor racing history. 

Jano's engines powered cars for Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Lancia and Ferrari during a career that spanned four decades, winning numerous Grand Prix races.  The legendary Argentinian Juan Manuel Fangio won the fourth of his five Formula One world championships in Jano's Lancia-Ferrari D50, in 1956.

Almost 30 years earlier, Jano's Alfa Romeo P2 won the very first Grand Prix world championship in 1925, while its successor, the P3, scored a staggering 46 race wins between 1932 and 1935.

He worked for Ferrari from the mid-50s onwards, where his greatest legacy was the V-8 Dino engine, which was the staple of Ferrari cars on the track and the road between 1966 and 2004.

Jano's parents were from Hungary, but settled in Italy, where his father worked as a mechanical engineer in Turin.  He was born in the small town of San Giorgio Canavese in Piedmont, about 35 kilometres north of Turin, and was originally called Viktor János.

Following his father into engineering, he joined Fiat at the age of just 20 and by 1921 was head of the design team.  Two years later, partly on the recommendation of Enzo Ferrari, then a young driver, he was hired by Milan-based Alfa Romeo, who were keen to raise their profile by becoming a successful name on the track.

They almost doubled his salary from 1800 lire per year with Fiat to 3500 lire per year but it was money well spent.  Jano's P2 car won its debut race in 1924, driven by Antonio Ascari, and gave the company the Grand Prix world championship the following year.

Its successor, the P3, was the first genuine single-seat racing car in Grand Prix racing.  Like the P2, it made a successful first appearance on the track, winning the 1932 Italian Grand Prix in the hands of the great Italian driver Tazio Nuvolari.  By this time Jano was effectively working for Ferrari.  Enzo had switched roles from driver to team manager and his Scuderia Ferrari had become Alfa Romeo's works team, taking over the racing operation completely when the parent company hit financial troubles in 1933.

Alberto Ascari pictured in the Lancia-Ferrari D50

But before he became a Ferrari employee, Jano returned to Turin in 1937 to join Lancia as chief development engineer. Jano was involved in making aircraft engines during World War II but returned to building cars, launching the successful D24 road racing car and then the D50 Formula One car, again for the Scuderia Ferrari team.

He moved to Ferrari in 1955 after Lancia, stunned by the death at 36 of their main driver, Alberto Ascari, during a test session at Monza, stepped away from racing. Ironically, Alberto's father, Antonio, had died at the wheel of Jano's Alfa Romeo P2 during the French Grand Prix of 1925, also aged 36.

Ferrari took over Lancia’s Grand Prix operations and Jano moved to their headquarters at Maranello, just outside Modena in Emilia-Romagna.

At Ferrari, Jano began working on a V-6 engine for Formula Two cars with Enzo’s son, Dino. Tragically, Dino died in 1956, struck down with muscular dystrophy, a year before the engine's debut.

The V-6 Dino engine was a commercial success, used in many of Ferrari's road-going vehicles before it was superseded in the mid-1960s by the V-8 version, which would eventually become the staple for Ferrari's luxury sports car range, from the 308 GTB produced under the original Dino badge in 1973 to the Berlinettas and Spiders in the 1990s, phased out only after the Modena 360 was discontinued in 2004.

Jano died in 1965, a month short of his 74th birthday, from self-inflicted gunshot wounds after being diagnosed with cancer.

Fiat's extraordinary Lingotto factory in Turin, complete
with its famous rooftop test track

Travel tip:

It was during Vittorio Jano's time at Fiat that the company was building its iconic factory in the Lingotto district of Turin, famous for a production line that progressed upwards through its five floors, with completed cars emerging on to a then-unique steeply banked test track at rooftop level. At the time the largest car factory in the world, built to a starkly linear design by the Futurist architect Giacomo Matte Trucco, it was closed in 1982 but reopened in 1989. Redesigned by the award-winning contemporary architect Renzo Piano, it now houses concert halls, a theatre, a convention centre, shopping arcades and a hotel, as well as the Automotive Engineering faculty of the Polytechnic University of Turin.  The rooftop track, which featured in the Michael Caine movie, The Italian Job, has been preserved and can still be visited today.

Travel tip:

The town of Maranello, 18 km from Modena, has been the home of the Ferrari car factory since the early 1940s, when Enzo Ferrari moved production from the Scuderia Ferrari Garage and Factory in Modena.  Visitors can sample the rich history of the company at the Museo Ferrari, which not only includes many impressive exhibits but interactive features such as Formula One simulators and an opportunity to take part in a pit lane tyre change, plus the chance to be photographed at the wheel of a Ferrari car.  For more information visit www.museomaranello.ferrari.com

More reading:

Italian designer of iconic Triumph sports cars


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