Adriano Panatta – tennis player

French Open champion was most at home on the clay

Adriano Panata was at the peak of his career in 1976

The only tennis player ever to defeat Bjorn Borg at Roland Garros in Paris, Adriano Panatta was born on this day in 1950 in Rome.

A successful singles player, Panatta reached the peak of his career in 1976 when he won the French Open, gaining his only Grand Slam title, defeating the American player, Harold Solomon, in the final 6-1, 6-4, 4-6, 7-6.

Panatta learnt to play tennis as a youngster on the clay courts of the Tennis Club Parioli in Rome, where his father was the caretaker.

He won top-level titles at Bournemouth in 1973, Florence in 1974 and at Kitzbuhel in Austria and Stockholm in 1975.

In the same year that he won the French Open, Panatta won the Italian Open in Rome, beating Guillermo Vilas in the final 2-6, 7-6, 6-2, 7-6. In the first round of the competition he had saved 11 match points in his match against the Australian Kim Warwick.

Panatta ended 1976 by helping Italy capture its only Davis Cup title, winning two singles and a doubles rubber in the final against Chile. He also reached his career-high singles ranking of World number four that year.

Adriano Panatta aged 20 in 1970 - the
 year he beat Nicola Pietrangeli

The only player to have defeated Bjorn Borg in the French Open, Panatta had the distinction of achieving this feat twice, in the fourth round in 1973 and in the quarter finals in 1976.  

Panatta’s most notable performance at Wimbledon was in 1979 when he reached the quarter finals. 

In all, he won 10 tournaments in singles and 17 in doubles. He is one of only four Italian players to have won a Grand Slam tournament, the others being Nicola Pietrangeli, who won the French open in 1959 and successfully defended his title in 1960, Francesca Schiavone, who won the French in 2010, and Flavia Pennetta, who was US Open champion in 2015.

It was by defeating Pietrangeli in five sets at the Italian International championships in Bologna in 1970 that Panatta first gave notice of his potential to reach the top.

As wells as helping Italy win the Davis Cup in 1976, Panatta assisted his country to reach the final in 1977, 1979 and 1980.

Since retiring as a player in 1983, Panatta has served as captain of Italy’s Davis Cup team and as Tournament Director of the Rome Masters.  For a while, he pursued an interest in speedboat racing and also served on Rome City Council as councillor in charge of sports and major events. For a number of years he worked as a television commentator.

The Parioli district is a pleasant Rome suburb with
bars and pavement cafes

Travel tip:

The Tennis Club Parioli, where Panatta learnt to play, is in Largo Uberto De Morpergo in the Parioli district, a northern suburb of Rome. The name comes from Monti Parioli, which are a series of hills. During the Fascist regime, many high-ranking party officials had residences in the Parioli district. Nowadays it is one of Rome’s most elegant residential areas and a number of foreign embassies are located there.

The Italian Open attracts large crowds to the Foro Italico

Travel tip:

The Italian Open, which Panatta won in 1976, is one of the most prestigious clay court tournaments in the world. It takes place each year at the Foro Italico, formerly known as Foro Mussolini, which was built between 1928 and 1938. Foro Italico is considered a prime example of Italian Fascist architecture, which was encouraged by Mussolini. The purpose was to bring the Olympic Games to Rome in 1944, however London won the bid. In the event, the 1944 Olympic Games had to be cancelled because of the Second World War.

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Flavio Briatore - entrepreneur

From clothing to luxury resorts via Formula One

Flavio Briatore has interests in a string of resorts
and restaurants serving wealthy clientele

The colourful and controversial entrepreneur Flavio Briatore was born on this day in 1950 in Verzuolo, a large village in the Italian Alps near Saluzzo in Piedmont.

Briatore is best known for his association with the Benetton clothing brand and, through their sponsorship, Formula One motor racing, but his business interests have extended well beyond the High Street and the race track.

His empire includes his exclusive Sardinian beach club Billionaire, Twiga beach clubs in Tuscany and Apulia, the Lion under the Sun spa resort in Kenya, the upmarket Sumosan, Twiga and Cipriani restaurants, and the Billionaire Couture menswear line.

Briatore was also for three years co-owner with former F1 chief executive Bernie Ecclestone and steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal of the English football club Queen’s Park Rangers.  He is also the man to whom the contestants must answer in the Italian version of the hit British TV series The Apprentice.

With a fortune estimated at £120m (€140m; $150m), Briatore lives the lifestyle of the super-rich clients he entertains at his clubs and restaurants, owns a £68.2m (€80m; $85m) yacht and has enjoyed the company of a string of beautiful and famous women.

These include supermodels Naomi Campbell and Heidi Klum, with whom he had a child, and the Italian TV presenter Adriana Volpe. In 2008 he married Elisabetta Gregoraci, once the Italian face of Wonderbra, who is 30 years his junior.  They have a son, Falco.

Briatore's wife, the former model Elisabetta Gregoraci

Both of Briatore’s parents were teachers but he was no academic, scraping through high school with the lowest grades. He found employment first as a ski instructor and then a restaurant manager before selling insurance.

It was while he was working at the Borsa – the Milan stock exchange – that in 1974 he met Luciano Benetton, founder of the Italian global clothing company.

Appointed director of group operations in the United States, where Benetton was undergoing significant expansion, Briatore’s job was to set up franchises across the country. He took a cut from each franchise agreement and, with 800 stores opened in the US in the 1980s, became an extremely wealthy man.

In 1989, Luciano Benetton began to sponsor F1 and, wanting someone to take charge of merchandising, turned again to Briatore.

From commercial director, Briatore was promoted to managing director and turned Benetton into a competitive F1 team, which he ran from 1990 to 1997. When the Benetton team was sold to Renault in 2000, Renault hired Briatore as team manager. In all, Briatore oversaw seven world titles in the constructors' and drivers' categories and was hailed as the man who ‘discovered’ the seven-times drivers’ champion, Michael Schumacher.

While there have been some spectacular successes in Briatore’s career, there have also been some catastrophes.

Flavio Briatore in his days as boss
of the Renault F1 team

One of his earliest jobs was as an assistant to businessman Attilio Dutto, owner of the Paramatti Vernici paint company in Cuneo that had previously been owned by Michele Sindona, the shady Sicily-born banker who laundered heroin proceeds for the Gambino family and was poisoned in prison.  Dutto was killed in 1979 in a suspected Mafia car bomb attack.

In 1980 Briatore was convicted on various counts of fraud and given two prison sentences amounting to four and a half years. These were reduced on appeal to two years and two months, although Briatore actually escaped jail by fleeing to the US Virgin Islands and benefitting from an amnesty on his return, which in Italian law amounts to the cancelling of the criminal convictions that led to the sentence.

His yacht at one time was seized during an investigation into alleged tax fraud and, in 2007, he was diagnosed with kidney cancer, for which he was treated successfully.

In 2009, Briatore was banned from motor racing after driver Nelson Piquet Jr alleged he had been instructed to crash deliberately in the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix in a move designed to help his Renault teammate, Fernando Alonso, another Briatore protégé, to win the race.

Motor racing’s governing body, the FIA, handed Briatore and his chief engineer, Pat Symonds, an indefinite ban. However, in 2010, Briatore’s ban was overturned by a French court and he was awarded €15,000 compensation, although his lawyers had asked for €1m.

He has remained involved with F1 as personal manager for Alonso, a close friend who drove the wedding car when he and Gregoraci were married at the Santo Spirito in Sassia church in Rome.

Travel tip:

Saluzzo, the nearest town to Briatore’s birthplace in Verzuolo, is known for its picturesque setting, built on a hill overlooking a fertile plain with a mountain backdrop, and close to the source of the River Po. Its well preserved historic centre features many antique shops and the main sights include Saluzzo cathedral, built at the end of the 15th century in Lombard-Gothic style.

Check Saluzzo hotels with Hotels.com

The expansive Piazza Galimberti in Cuneo

Travel tip:

The beautiful city of Cuneo, which developed at the confluence of the Stura and Gesso rivers, is set out in a grid system with a large, elegant central square, Piazza Galimberti, one of the largest squares in Italy, after Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples. Surrounded by neo-classical buildings, it has a large statue of Giuseppe Barbaroux, the author of the Albertine Statute that formed the constitution of the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont in 1848. The square is named after Duccio Galimberti, one of the heroes of the Italian resistance in the Second World War.

More reading:

Elio de Angelis - last of the 'gentleman racers'

How Michele Alboreto almost ended Italy's long wait for a new champion

Ferruccio Lamborghini - the tractor maker who took on Ferrari

Also on this day:

1948: The birth of World Cup winning football coach Marcello Lippi

(Picture credits: Main Briatore pic by Minerva97; Elisabetta Gregoraci by franco.ruspa; Briatore in Renault days by Bert van Dijk; Piazza Galimberti by Gian Francesco Fanti; all via Wikemedia Commons)

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