King appoints Mussolini Prime Minister

Victor Emmanuel turned to Fascist leader after fearing civil war

Victor Emmanuel III

Victor Emmanuel III, the king of Italy, invited Benito Mussolini to become Prime Minister on this day in 1922, ushering in the era of Fascist rule in Italy.

History has largely perceived the decision as a moment of weakness on the part of the king, a man of small physical stature who had never been particularly comfortable in his role.

Yet at the time, with violent clashes between socialist supporters and Mussolini’s Blackshirts occurring almost daily with both sides bent on revolution, Victor Emmanuel feared that Italy was on the brink of civil war.

The First World War had been financially crippling for Italy, even though they had emerged with a victory of sorts in that the Austro-Hungarians were finally pushed out of northern Italy.

In the poverty that followed, the country shifted sharply to the left and in the 1919 general election the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) gained 32 per cent of the vote, amounting to 156 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the largest representation in their history.

But for all the support for the PSI, particularly among factory workers in urban areas, there were just as many Italians who felt uncomfortable about their advance, and not only those who belonged to the moneyed elite.  The PSI had aligned themselves with the Russian Bolsheviks and were determined to pursue a strong ultra-left agenda that included the overthrow of bourgeois capitalism, but also threatened, through state seizure of agricultural land, to deny rural workers any prospect of fulfilling their aspiration to own land themselves.

The king with Mussolini in Rome in 1923

Ironically, Mussolini had been the leader of this Bolshevik faction of the PSI before the First World War, his own politics having been founded in socialist values.

But he was expelled from the party after going against their opposition to the war and moving towards national syndicalism, which embraced the principle of workers’ collectives owning the means of production but which favoured tight state control and only limited democracy, combined with military expansion to further national growth.

Many similarly displaced former PSI members joined Mussolini in forming the Fascist Revolutionary Party, which evolved into the National Fascist Party.  And though Mussolini’s party differed from the socialists in several areas, it still portrayed itself as being on the side of the people.

Both sides promised to take power away from the ruling classes and politicians by whom many ordinary Italians felt betrayed and though, as a character, he lacked decisiveness, Victor Emmanuel knew he could not allow the social unrest to continue and would have to come down on one side or the other if order were to be restored.

Matters came to a head when he became aware that Mussolini, who had already acquired a considerable following and effective control in parts of northern Italy, was planning an insurrection in which he would lead his Blackshirts in a symbolic March on Rome.  Luigi Facta, the Liberal prime minister, drafted a decree of martial law, having been advised by General Pietro Badoglio to tell Victor Emmanuel his troops could repel the uprising. But after initially indicating he would sign the decree, the king then changed his mind.

Victor Emmanuel overestimated the
threat of the Fascists to Rome

This was partly because he overestimated the number of men likely to take part in the march and the degree to which they would be armed, and partly because he did not trust the army not to take the opportunity to stage a coup. Largely, though, it was because he considered allowing Italy to fall into the hands of the Marxists in the PSI to be unthinkable.

As it happens, having been told that the army would remain loyal to the king, and knowing that the 300,000-strong force he would later claim to have taken part actually amounted a the start to fewer than 10,000, Mussolini was on the point of abandoning the insurrection.

Instead, a few minutes before midnight on October 29, he received a telegram from the king inviting him to Palazzo del Quirinale, the official Rome residence of the monarch and the seat of power. 

By noon the following day, aged only 39, with no previous experience of office and only 35 Fascists deputies in the Chamber, he had been sworn in as President of the Council of Ministers – the Prime Minister.  Rather than marching into Rome to seize power, Mussolini actually travelled to the capital by train.  The march did take place, but as a celebration.

The decision allowed Mussolini to crush the opposition, his thugs continuing to employ the violent methods that had allowed him to dominate northern and central areas of the country before his accession to power to reinforce his rule across the whole of the country.

Mussolini joined the March on Rome, although by then
his objective of taking power had been achieved

Victor Emmanuel’s real crime was to stand aside while all this was taking place, failing to act even when Giacomo Matteotti, a socialist deputy who outspokenly claimed the 1923 election was rigged, was assassinated, with clear evidence that Fascists close to Mussolini were involved.

He allowed Mussolini free rein to abuse his power, to the extent that he had dropped all pretence of democracy within three years, passing a law that decreed that he was no longer answerable to parliament, only to the king.

By the time, in 1943, with Italy again sinking into civil war, Victor Emmanuel ordered Mussolini’s arrest following a Fascist Grand Council vote to remove him as leader, the Italian royal family by their association with Fascism were irreversibly discredited.

The Palazzo del Quirinale used to be the royal residence in Rome

Travel tip:

The Palazzo del Quirinale, a vast complex 20 times larger than the White House and a seat of power in Italy since it was built in 1583, sits on the top of Quirinal Hill, one of the seven hills of Rome.  It has been the official residence of 30 popes – it was built originally as a summer residence for Pope Gregory XIII – four kings of Italy and 12 presidents of the Italian republic. It became a royal palace after the unification of Italy in 1871, although Victor Emmanuel III preferred to live elsewhere, in the Villa Savoia, a house set in parkland in the northern part of the city.

The church of San Sepolcro in the square of the same name
in central Milan, where Mussolini launched his Fascist party

Travel tip:

The roots of the Mussolini’s National Fascist Party can be traced back to a rally that took place in Milan’s Piazza San Sepolcro on March 23, 1919, when the expelled former official of the Italian Socialist Party launched a fascio – the word in use it Italy in the late 19^th and early 20th century to describe any political group.  His Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (roughly translated: Italian League of Combatants) was initially meant to represent combatants from the First World War angered at the failure of the king and state to secure the appropriate rewards for Italy after the sacrifices made by Italian soldiers in achieving a victory.  The Piazza san Sepolcro is in the centre of Milan, a few streets away from the Duomo, just behind the Ambrosian Library.

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Pierre Cardin - fashion designer

Star of Parisian haute couture was born in Italy

Pierre Cardin, pictured in 2009

Pierre Cardin, who has been described as the last survivor of the heyday of Parisian haute couture in the 50s and 60s, was born on this day in 1922 in the province of Treviso, north of Venice.

There are differing versions of the story of Cardin’s Italian origins.

One says that his parents were French but had a holiday home in Italy and that he was born in the village of Sant’ Andrea di Barbarana, on the Piave river, where his parents had a house.

Another says that his father was Italian, a labourer, that he was born in another small town in the province, San Biagio di Callalta and that he was the last of 11 children. This version suggests his father was in his 60s when Pierre – christened Pietro – was born.

What is agreed is that the family left Italy for France in 1924, possibly because of his father’s unease at the rise of Mussolini and his opposition to Fascism.

They settled in the industrial city of Saint-Etienne, where Pierre began his career in the clothing industry in 1936 when he was taken on as a tailor’s apprentice.

He moved to Vichy in 1939 and worked during the Second World War for the Red Cross before relocating to Paris in 1945, determined to make his name in the fashion world.

The trademark Pierre Cardin
bubble dress of the 1950s

At first, he worked with the Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli and designed costumes for the film director Jean Cocteau. before joining Christian Dior.  His talent shone through from an early stage and in 1950 he started his own fashion house.

The first Pierre Cardin dresses were unveiled at a lavish masquerade ball in 1953 – dubbed ‘the party of the century’ – in a palace on the Grand Canal in Venice.

Cardin’s first boutique, Eve, opened in Paris in 1954, the same year that his so-called ‘bubble dress’ – a loose-fitting dress tightened near the waistline and brought in at the hem to create a ‘bubble’ effect – brought him international success.

He became known for his avant-garde designs, inspired often by things he had seen in travelling around the world.  His clothes for a while showed a Japanese influence after he had visited Tokyo in 1957 to open Japan’s first high fashion store.

Later, after he had visited NASA headquarters in Washington, his designs began to have a futuristic space-age look.

Cardin was one of the first designers to realise the potential of ready-to-wear as haute couture began to decline in the 1960s. Indeed, he was expelled from the snooty Chambre Syndicale – the guardian of fashion standards – for launching a ready-to-wear line in the department store Printemps, although he was quickly reinstated.

He was also a pioneer of the designer label culture, launching a collection during the late 1960s that was the first to include the designer’s logo stitched on each garment.  He became something of an iconic figure of the Swinging Sixties era, designing clothes for both The Beatles – the collarless jackets were his idea – and The Rolling Stones.

The Pierre Cardin logo is known the world over

In 1971 he turned a former theatre in Paris into Espace Cardin, where he would not only show his clothes but would also promote rising artistic talents – in music and theatre – by offering them the chance to perform on his stage.

In time, much to the disapproval of some of his contemporaries in the Paris fashion world, the Pierre Cardin name began to appear on all manner of products – from baseball caps to cars – as the company sought to exploit the brand.  Some critics condemned him for ‘cheapening’ the company’s image; others applauded his entrepreneurialism.

The company bought Maxim’s in Paris in 1981 and from it developed a worldwide chain of exclusive restaurants and hotels.

In 2011, the business was valued at around $1 billion. Cardin’s proud boast was that he built the business from scratch, without ever having to borrow money.

Cardin, now in his 90s and, until recently, still designing clothes personally in his studio, owns among other homes a castle at Lacoste, Vaucluse once owned by the Marquis de Sade and a palazzo in Venice that he claims once belonged to Giacomo Casanova, although history shows that its historical owner was Giovanni Bragadin di San Cassian, Bishop of Verona and Patriarch of Venice.

The Ca' d'Oro is one of the most famous palaces
on the Grand Canal in Venice

Travel tip:

The buildings that line the Grand Canal in Venice, of which there are about 170, were mostly built between the 13th and the 18th century, when noble Venetian families wanted to show off their wealth in suitable palaces. Among the most famous are the Palazzo Barbaro, Ca' Rezzonico, Ca' d'Oro, Palazzo Dario, Ca' Foscari, Palazzo Barbarigo and the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, which today houses the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

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Antonio Ghirelli - journalist

Neapolitan writer specialised in football and politics

Antonio Ghirelli

Antonio Ghirelli, a patriarch of Italian journalism, was born on this day in 1922 in Naples.

As passionate about football as he was about politics, Ghirelli was equally at home writing about both. At different times he edited the three principal Italian sports daily newspapers, La Gazzetta dello Sport, Tuttosport and Corriere dello Sport, but also wrote with distinction in the editorial and opinion pages of such respected titles as L'Unità, Paese Sera, Avanti!, Corriere della Sera, Il Mondo and Il Globo.

Sandro Pertini, who was President of Italy from 1978 to 1985, so respected his wisdom that he invited him to be head of the Quirinale press office. His politics were in line with those of the Socialist Pertini, as they were with Bettino Craxi, Italy’s first Socialist prime minister, for whom he was principal press officer during Craxi’s two spells in office.

Ghirelli’s first taste of politics came at university in Naples, when he wrote for a young Fascist journal.  Any sympathies he might have had with the Fascists soon disappeared, however, as Mussolini’s early socialist ideals became corrupted by his fervent nationalism and intolerance of political opponents.

Instead, Ghirelli joined the Italian Communist Party and fought against the Fascists in the Second World War as a member of the Italian Resistance. With sponsorship from the Americans, he became a voice of Radio Free Bologna.

Ghirelli worked for the president,
Sandro Pertini, at the Quirinale

In turn he was driven away from communism, mainly by the events in Hungary in 1956, when a people’s uprising against the rigidity and anti-democratic nature of Hungarian government was ruthlessly put down by Soviet troops.

He signed up instead with the Italian Socialist Party, his association with whom would later bring him into contact with Pertini.

Ghirelli cut his teeth in journalism with L'Unità, Milano Sera and Paese Sera, the afternoon edition of the left-wing Rome daily Il Paese, before his love of football and in particular his team, Napoli, drew him away from politics and into sport as the Rome editor of La Gazzetta dello Sport.

A period as editor of Tuttosport followed before Corriere dello Sport offered him the chance to apply his skills to editing the whole newspaper, which he did with success from 1965 to 1972.

In a departure from what seemed to be a secure position, he accepted the chance to work for Pertini, another left-winger in the political context who shared his enthusiasm for football. The arrangement seemed perfect for Ghirelli, only to fail after only two years over a press release concerning prime minister Francesco Cossiga, and pressure for him to resign over his supposed involvement in helping the left-wing terrorist, Marco Donat-Cattin – son of a Christian Democrat minister – to escape Italy.  Ghirelli resigned, it is said, to protect the young colleague who wrote the press release.

Ghirelli pictured during the 1980s

It was not long, however, before he returned to a position of influence in Rome’s political circles, appointed by Craxi to head the prime minister’s press office.

Once Craxi’s two periods in office were over, Ghirelli returned to mainstream journalism, first in television as the editor of TG2, the news section of Rai Due, and then as editor of the socialist newspaper Avanti!

A prolific author, Ghirelli wrote numerous books, several with a political theme but also many about the history of his beloved home city, Naples, and a number about Italian football.

He died in Rome in 2012, a month short of his 90th birthday, having remained politically active – he had joined the reconstituted Italian Socialist Party in 2008 – almost to the end.  Since his death, the Italian Football Federation has awarded an annual prize for football writing, the Premio Antonio Ghirelli.

Travel tip:

The Palazzo del Quirinale (more often known simply as Il Quirinale) takes its name from its location on Quirinal Hill, the highest of the seven hills of Rome. Built originally in 1583 as a summer residence for Pope Gregory XIII, it has been the official home of the president of Italy since the republic was established in 1946. The current president, Sergio Mattarella, is the 12th in that office to occupy the living quarters. He follows 30 popes and four Kings of Italy, it having been the official royal residence from 1871. Covering an area of 110,500 square metres, it is the ninth-largest palace in the world, with 1,200 rooms. By comparison, the White House in Washington is one 20th of the size.

The Villa Rosebery overlooks the Bay of Naples

Travel tip: 

In his affection for Naples, Ghirelli would have enjoyed the times in which Sandro Pertini chose to leave Rome for the official presidential residence in Naples, the Villa Rosebery, which occupies a 6.6-hectare (16.3 acres) site in the Marechiaro district, a well-to-do area of the city overlooking the north side of the Bay of Naples, with views of Vesuvius and, from some vantage points, the island of Capri. It is so named because it was once owned by a British prime minister, The 5th Earl of Rosebery. Formerly a Bourbon residence, it fell within the territory that became part of the united Italy after the overthrow of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1860. Lord Rosebery bought it from a business associate, Gustavo Delahente, in 1897.  

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Ugo Tognazzi - comic actor

Achieved international fame through La Cage aux Folles

Ugo Tognazzi became known for playing
suave bon viveurs in Commedia all'Italiana

Ugo Tognazzi, the actor who achieved international fame in the film La Cage aux Folles, was born on this day in 1922 in Cremona.

Renowned for his wide repertoire in portraying comic characters, Tognazzi made more than 62 films and worked with many of Italy's top directors.

Along with Vittorio Gassman, Alberto Sordi and Nino Manfredi, Tognazzi was regarded as one of the four top stars of Commedia all'Italiana - comedy the Italian way - in the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1981 he won the award for best actor at the Cannes International Film Festival for his role in Bernardo Bertolucci's Tragedia di un Uomo Ridicolo (The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man).

His work was widely acclaimed in Italy, but it was not until he was cast in the role of homosexual cabaret owner Renato Baldi in the French director Édouard Molinaro's 1979 movie La Cage Aux Folles that he became known outside Italy.   The film became in its time the most successful foreign language film ever released in the United States, with box office receipts of more than $20 million.

A publicity poster from the French film La
Cage aux Folles in which Tognazzi starred

The film spawned two sequels in which Tognazzi reprieved the role of the mincing Baldi, who in the story was the joint owner of a night club in St Tropez that specialised in drag acts.

The son of an insurance agent, Tognazzi left school at 14 to help supplement the family income, taking a job as an accountancy clerk in the Negroni salami factory in his home town.  His father had wanted him to become a musician, his mother a priest.

Although he had made his stage debut as a four-year-old child in a charity show at the Teatro Donizetti in Bergamo, he had no thoughts of an acting career until he began participating in amateur dramatics via Negroni's recreational club.

During his military service with the Navy, he became involved with putting on entertainment for his fellow sailors.  After the Second World War, he moved to Milan in search of opportunities in theatre and found work with a number of companies, but it was after he landed his first film role in 1950, in I cadetti di Guascogna, directed by Mario Mattoli.  that his career began to take off.

The following year he met his fellow comic actor Raimondo Vianello, and their collaboration led them to form a successful comedy duo for the fledgling RAI television network.  Their show Un Due Tre (One Two Three) became famous for its wry satire and was among the first to be censored on Italian television.  It ran from 1954 to 1960.

Ugo Tognazzi as Il Commissario Pepe in Ettore Scola's
1969 film of the same name 

After his first major big screen success in Il Federale (The Fascist), a 1961 film by Luciano Salce, Tognazzi became one of the leading performers of Commedia all'Italiana. 

Excelling as bon vivants, adulterous husbands and other suave individuals, he made many films with the writer-director  Marco Ferreri.  He also worked with Mario Monicelli, Carlo Lizzani, Dino Risi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ettore Scola and Pupi Avati among others.

Risi's Marcia su Roma (The March on Rome) brought him praise but it was with Ferreri that he enjoyed sustained success. Together they made films that included Una Storia Moderna: L'Ape Regina (also called The Conjugal Bed) in 1963, La Donna Scimmia (The Ape Woman) in 1964, Marcia Nuziale (Wedding March) in 1966, L'Udienza (The Audience) in 1971 and La Grande Bouffe in 1973.

As well as La Cage Aux Folles, in which he surprised critics by accepting a role so different from his usual range, he appeared before wider film audiences after Roger Vadim cast Tognazzi as Mark Hand, the Catchman, opposite Jane Fonda in Barbarella (1968).

He had children by three women - the Irish dancer Pat O'Hara, with whom he had a son, Ricky, the Norwegian actress Margarete Robsahm, the mother of his second son, Thomas Robsahm, and Franca Bettoia, an actress, with whom he settled in Velletri, near Rome, after their marriage in 1972.  They had a son, Gianmarco, and a daughter, Maria Sole.  All of his children followed him into the movie business.

Tognazzi, a passionate supporter of AC Milan and a lover of food who also put his name to a number of recipe books, died in 1990 after suffering a brain hemorrhage.

The Duomo and Baptistery in the centre of Cremona

Travel tip:

Cremona, well known for its tradition of violin making, is a prosperous city in Lombardy with a wealth of fine medieval architecture, much of it concentrated around the Piazza del Comune, including the cathedral, finished in 1107 and rebuilt in 1190 after suffering damage in an earthquake, which includes impressive frescoes - the Storie di Cristo - by Pordenone.  A chapel inside the Duomo contains what is said to be a thorn from Jesus's crown of thorns.

The Corso della Repubblica in Velletri is typical of the
narrow streets in the town near Rome where Tognazzi died

Travel tip:

Velletri, a town of 50,000 inhabitants, lies just southeast of the Castelli Romani to the south of Rome.  It was once a popular place for Rome's wealthiest to build their country villas.  It suffered considerable damage soon after the Allied landing at Anzio during the Second World War after the advancing army met resistance from German forces in and around the town.  Many monuments were beyond repair, sadly, but the town remains an attractive alternative to staying in the capital and the towns of the Colli Albani are close by, including Castel Gandolfo, the summer residence of the Pope.

More reading:

The comic genius of Alberto Sordi

Cesare Danova - from medical school to Mean Streets

Was Otto e mezzo (8½) Fellini's finest work?

Also on this day:

1919: The founding of Mussolini's Fascist Party

(Picture credits: Cremona cathedral by Jakub Halun; Velletri street by Deblu68; via Wikimedia Commons)




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Francesco Rosi - film director

Documentary style put him among greats of Italian cinema

Francesco Rosi

The film director Francesco Rosi, one of Italy's most influential movie-makers over four decades, was born on this day in 1922 in Naples. 

Rosi, who made his directing debut in 1958 and filmed his last movie in 1997, built on the fashion for neo-realism that dominated Italian cinema in the immediate post-war years and his films were often highly politicised.

Many of his works were almost pieces of investigative journalism, driven by his revulsion at the corruption and inequality he witnessed in the area in which he grew up, and the dubious relationships between local government and figures from the crime world.

His film Hands Over the City, for example, starring Rod Steiger as unscrupulous land developer, sought to show how the landscape of Naples was shaped by greed and political interests.  The film's disclaimer stated that “All characters and events narrated in this film are fictitious, but the social reality that created them is authentic.”

The Mattei Affair, which starred Gian Maria Volonté - himself a political activist - tells the story of Enrico Mattei, a former Italian resistance fighter who rose to be head of ENI, the state-owned oil company, and died in a plane crash in Sicily. Conspiracy theorists linked his death with his attempt, in the middle of the Cold War, to break America's dominance of the Italian market, sign deals with Arab countries and even court Russia as a possible trading partner.

The project took Rosi's team into such dangerous political territory that one of his researchers, the journalist Mauro de Mauro, disappeared. He was never found and it is presumed he was murdered for finding out too much about the case.

Gian Maria Volonté (centre) in a scene from The Mattei Affair

Lucky Luciano, which featured Volonté and Steiger, was another movie filmed in the style of a documentary investigation, this time with its focus on the controversial role of a repatriated Sicilian-American Mafia boss in the Allied liberation of Sicily and the assault on the Italian mainland towards the end of the Second World War.

Later, with Illustrious Corpses, Rosi sought to shine light on the dark machinations of what would come to be known as 'The Strategy of Tension' during the 1980s, in which a series of deadly attacks carried out by right-wing extremists with the apparent collusion of the secret services would be blamed on activists on the hard left in order to derail an alliance being proposed between the Christian Democrat Party and the Communist Party.

Among his many awards was a Palme d'Or at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival for The Mattei Affair, a Golden Lion at the 1963 Venice Biennale for Hands Over the City and ten David di Donatello awards from the Academy of Italian Cinema.

In 2012, he was awarded an honorary Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for lifetime achievement and leaving "an indelible mark on the history of Italian film-making".

Rosi was born in Montecalvario, a neighbourhood of central Naples that includes part of the Spanish Quarter, the Piazza Carità and the bustling Via Toledo.  His father worked in the shipping industry, but also drew satirical cartoons, once earning a reprimand for his insulting depictions of Benito Mussolini and King Vittorio Emmanuel III.

Giorgio Napoletana, a schoolfriend of Francesco Rosi,
who would go one to become President of the Republic

Rosi went to college with Giorgio Napolitano, who would later become Italian President, and they would remain lifelong friends.  He studied law but his career took him in a different direction, first as an illustrator of children's books, then as a reporter with Radio Napoli.

The connections he made through the radio station led him into theatre work and film.  After several films as assistant director, learning from Ettore Giannini and Luchino Visconti among others, he made his solo debut in 1958 with La Sfida (The Challenge), an expose of corruption in the retail trade in Naples which quickly made clear Rosi's preoccupation with social justice and the complex labyrinths in Italian society.

His breakthrough in terms of international acclaim came in 1962 with Salvatore Giuliano, a fictional exploration of the life of the Sicilian bandit of the title, his connections with the state and the church, and his role in fighting against communism in Sicily.  Rosi's aim was to use the bandit’s life and death to convey the complexities of post-war Sicilian politics and society in which "resolving the truth was an impossibility."

Salvatore Giuliano won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1962 and established Rosi as one of the central figures of the post-neorealist phase in Italian cinema, along with Gillo Pontecorvo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Taviani brothers, Ettore Scola and Valerio Zurlini.

Rosi’s later movies were accomplished productions but critics felt they lacked the power of his earlier work, although in his adaptation of Christ Stopped at Eboli, Carlo Levi's memoir about his experiences as a doctor exiled in southern Italy for his anti-Fascist views, with Volonté in the title role, came close, winning a BAFTA for Best Foreign Language Film.

After ending his career in film with The Truce, based on holocaust survivor Primo Levi's memoir of returning to Italy after his liberation from Auschwitz, he returned to theatre, notably directing the Neapolitan comedies of Eduardo De Filippo.

He spent his last years living in Rome on Via Gregoriana, near the Spanish Steps.   He died in 2015 aged 92.

The Via Toledo in Naples has a typical flavour of the city

Travel tip:

Montecal- vario, where Francesco Rosi was born, is said by many visitors to capture the essence of Naples.  Bordered on one side by the Via Toledo, the busy shopping street which links Piazza Dante with Piazza Trieste e Trento, it includes the part of the Spanish Quarter in which can be found the Teatro Nuovo, an historic theatre originally built in 1724 and twice destroyed by fire.  The theatre became famous for comic opera in the 19th century and in the 20th century staged the plays of the great Neapolitian comic dramatist, Eduardo de Filippo.

Hotels in Napoli by Booking.com

Travel tip:

The Via Gregoriana, where Francesco Rosi spent his last years, is a street almost in the centre of Rome, very close to the tourist hubbub of Piazza di Spagna and the Spanish Steps, yet still retains the air of a peaceful residential thoroughfare, the kind you might expect to find in a well-to-do suburb.  Commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII in 1575, it runs from the church of Trinita dei Monti, which looks down over Piazza di Spagna, towards Via del Tritone and has long been popular with artists and intellectuals.

Rome hotels by Booking.com

More reading:

Ennio Morricone, the film music maestro enters his 89th year

Anna Magnani - Oscar winning star of neo-realist fashion

The legacy of Fellini and La Dolce Vita

Also on this day:

1905: The birth of conductor Annunzio Mantovani


(Picture credits: Francesco Rosi by Georges Biard; Gian Maria Volonté by Pèter; Giorgio Napoletana by Ralf Roletschek; Via Toledo by Inviaggiocommons all via Wikimedia Commons)

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Margherita Hack – astrophysicist

TV personality made science more popular

Margherita Hack, pictured in Rome in 2007

Writer and astrophysicist Margherita Hack was born on this day in 1922 in Florence.

She studied stars by analysing the different kinds of radiation they emitted and frequently appeared on television to explain new findings in astronomy and physics.

Hack, whose father, Roberto Hack, was of Swiss origin, graduated in physics from the University of Florence in 1945. She worked at the Brera Astronomical Observatory just outside Milan and then became a professor at the University of Trieste.

She spent more than 20 years as director of the observatory in Trieste, the first woman in Italy to hold such a position. Under her leadership, the observatory became one of the foremost research centres in Italy.

Hack wrote many scientific papers and books, winning awards for her research. Her television appearances helped make science more popular with ordinary people.

Hack was also known for her strong political views and for her criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church, which she believed had an unscientific outlook.

Hack was awarded the honour of Dame Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 2012 and the asteroid 8558 Hack, discovered in 1995, was named after her.

Margherita Hack died in Trieste in 2013 at the age of 91.

Travel tip:

The University of Florence can trace its origins back to the 14th century, but the modern University, where Margherita Hack studied Physics, dates back to 1859, when a number of higher studies institutions were grouped together. The resulting Institute was officially recognised as a University by the Italian parliament in 1923.

Trieste's own Grand Canal has echoes of Venice

Travel tip:

Trieste, where Margherita Hack worked for many years, is the main city of the region of Friuli Venezia Giulia and lies close to the Slovenian border. It was once the main seaport of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is a fascinating mix of styles, with the seafront, canals and imposing squares reminiscent of Venice and the coffee houses and architecture showing Austrian influence from the era of Hapsburg domination.

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Enrico Berlinguer - Communist politician

Popular leader turned left-wing party into political force

Enrico Berlinguer

Enrico Berlinguer, who for more than a decade was Western Europe's most powerful and influential Communist politician, was born on this day in 1922 in the Sardinian city of Sassari.

As secretary-general of the Italian Communist Party from March 1972 until his death in 1984, he led the largest Communist movement outside the Eastern Bloc, coming close to winning a general election in 1976.

He achieved popularity by striving to establish the Italian Communists as a political force that was not controlled from Moscow, pledging a commitment to democracy, a parliamentary system, a mixed economy, and Italian membership of the Common Market and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

At its peak, Berlinguer's Westernized brand of Communism appealed to nearly a third of Italian voters.  His policies were adopted by other left-wing parties in Europe under what became known as Eurocommunism. 

As support for the previously dominant Christian Democrats waned in the 1970s, he proposed a ''historic compromise'' with other parties, rejecting the traditional left-wing vision of violent revolution, and declared that the Italian Communists would be happy to enter into a coalition with Christian Democrats and others.

In fact, in the elections of 1976, at a time when Italy faced economic collapse, Berlinguer's Communists came close to winning power in their own right, polling 34 per cent of the vote.  The Christian Democrats prevailed with 38 per cent but needed the support of some groups on the extreme right to do so.

The result sent shock waves across the Atlantic.  Political leaders in America, in particular Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, regarded Italy as a bulwark against the Eastern Bloc and were alarmed that the Italian Communists had been so close to power.

This cover of Time magazine reflected disquiet
 in the United States at Berlinguer's success

Despite his failure to become Prime Minister, Berlinguer remained one of Italy's foremost politicians. The Christian Democrats had to rely on Communist support to pass legislation and Berlinguer was thereby in a position to influence policy.

His party membership grew to 1.7 million and its success in local elections meant the Communists effectively governed nearly half of the Italian population anyway, controlling Rome and many of the major northern cities, including Turin, Milan, Bologna, Florence and Venice.

Berlinguer was born into a middle-class Sardinian family of noble descent yet the politics of his father Mario, a lawyer, leaned heavily towards the left. A socialist deputy and later senator, he was acquainted with a number of Communist leaders, including Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti. The latter became Enrico Berlinguer's political mentor.

Having become a Communist Party member in 1943, Berlinguer was put in charge of the Young Communists in his home town of Sassari. He was arrested and jailed in 1944 after taking part in demonstrations against the Fascist regime.

Released after three months, he resumed his role as an organizer of communist youth, first in Milan and then Rome. He became a member of the party’s Central Committee in 1945 and the party executive in 1948.

He was elected to the Italian parliament in 1968, becoming the party's deputy secretary-general a year later and replacing Luigi Longo, an old-style Communist who had become the party leader after Togliatti's death in 1964, as secretary-general in March 1972.

Married with three children and fiercely protective of his private life, Berlinguer died in June 1984 aged only 62, having suffered a stroke while delivering a speech in Padua and never regaining consciousness.

Sassari's Piazza d'Italia is an example of the city's
elegant neoclassical architecture

Travel tip:

The second largest city in Sardinia, with a population of more than 125,000, Sassari is rich in art, culture and history.  It is well known for beautiful palazzi, the Fountain of the Rosello, and its elegant neoclassical architecture, such as Piazza d'Italia and the Teatro Civico.

Travel tip:

Padua - Padova in Italian - is a city in the Veneto region of northern Italy, best known for the frescoes by Giotto that adorn the Scrovegni Chapel and for the vast 13th-century Basilica of St. Anthony.

(Photo of Piazza d'Italia in Sassari by Gianni Careddu CC BY-SA 4.0)

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Renata Tebaldi – opera singer

Performer with a beautiful lirico soprano voice

Renata Tebaldi pictured in 1961

Opera singer Renata Tebaldi was born on this day in 1922 in Pesaro.

Said by the conductor Arturo Toscanini to possess ‘the voice of an angel’, Tebaldi had a long stage career and made numerous recordings.

Her parents had separated before her birth and she grew up in the home of her maternal grandparents in Langhirano in the province of Parma in Emilia-Romagna.

Tebaldi was stricken with polio at the age of three but later became interested in music and sang in the church choir. She was sent to have piano lessons but the teacher decided she should study singing instead and arranged for her to attend the conservatory in Parma. She later transferred to Liceo Musicale Rossini in Pesaro.

Tebaldi made her stage debut in 1944, while Italy was still at war, in Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele at the Teatro Sociale in Rovigo but her beautiful voice first began to attract attention in 1946 when she appeared as Desdemona in Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello in Trieste.

She auditioned for Toscanini who was immediately impressed by her and she made her debut at Teatro alla Scala in 1946 singing in a concert to mark the reopening of the theatre after the Second World War.

Mario Del Monaco was famous for his
portrayal of Giuseppe Verdi's Otello

The following year, she played her first operatic role - Eva in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg - at the same opera house.

Toscanini encouraged her to learn to sing the part of Aida and to rehearse in his own studio.

She made her debut in the role at La Scala in 1950 alongside Mario Del Monaco, which helped launch her international career.

In 1950 Maria Callas was taken on at La Scala as a substitute Aida when Tebaldi was indisposed.

There were rumours of rivalry between them for the rest of their careers although Tebaldi considered herself to be a lyric soprano and Callas considered herself to be a dramatic coloratura soprano.

Nonetheless, partly for the sake of peace, Tebaldi decided to spend a lot of time in the United States. She made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1955, where she sang regularly until her last appearance in 1973, signing off as she had begun with a performance as Desdemona in Otello.

She retired from singing completely in 1976 and died at the age of 82 at her home in San Marino.

A small museum dedicated to Tebaldi has been opened in the stables of the Villa Pallavicino in Busseto - Verdi's home town - which is also the home of the National Giuseppe Verdi Museum. Among the exhibits are many costumes and mementoes from her personal life, including letters from John F Kennedy and Rudy Giuliani, the former Mayor of New York.

The Teatro Lirico Giuseppe Verdi in Trieste, where
Renata Tebaldi enjoyed her first success

Travel tip:

Teatro Lirico Giuseppe Verdi in Trieste, where Tebaldi had her first big stage success, was built to replace a smaller theatre and inaugurated as Teatro Nuovo in 1801. It was the site of the premiere of Verdi’s opera Il Corsaro in 1848 featuring soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, who Verdi later married. Within hours of Verdi’s death in 1901 the theatre had been renamed in honour of the composer.

The Castle of Torrechiara towers above the town
of Langhirano, near the city of Parma

Travel tip:

Langhirano, Renata Tebaldi’s home town, is situated about about 90km (56 miles) west of Bologna and about 20km (12 miles) south of Parma in Emilia-Romagna. It is known for the big 15th century Castle of Torrechiara, perched on high ground overlooking a valley, where a music festival dedicated to Renata Tebaldi is held each summer. Although Tebaldi died in San Marino, she was buried at Langhirano Cemetery.

More reading:

Chance opportunity that turned cellist Toscanini into a conductor

Arrigo Boito - the composer who fought under Garibaldi

What made Mario Del Monaco one of the great Otellos

Also on this day:

1690: The birth of virtuoso violinist Francesco Maria Veracini

1891: The birth of Corradino d'Ascanio, designer of the Vespa scooter

(Picture credits: Renata Tebaldi by Umberto Borsò; Castle of Torrechiara by Fabio Macor via Creative Commons)


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