Maria De Filippi - television presenter

One of the most popular faces on Italian TV

Maria De Filippi has become one of the
most popular presenters on Italian TV

The television presenter Maria De Filippi, who has hosted numerous talk and talent shows in a career spanning 25 years, was born on this day in 1961 in Milan.

De Filippi is best known as the presenter of the long-running talent show Amici de Maria De Filippi, which completed its 17th season this year, having been launched in 2001.

The show’s predecessor, called simply Amici, was hosted by De Filippi from 1993 onwards.

One of the most popular faces on Italian television, De Filippi has been married since 1995 to the veteran talk show host and journalist Maurizio Costanzo, who celebrated his 80th birthday this year.

The daughter of a drugs company representative and a Greek teacher, De Filippi was born in Milan before moving at age 10 to Mornico Losana, a village in the province of Pavia, where her parents owned a vineyard.

A graduate in law, she had ambitions of a career as a magistrate but in 1989, while she was working in the legal department of a video cassette company, she had a chance meeting with Costanzo at a conference in Venice to discuss ways of combating musical piracy.

Maria De Filippi presented the 2017 Sanremo Music
Festival along another popular TV host, Carlo Conti

She clearly made an impression on the broadcaster, already well known as the face of the Maurizio Costanzo Show. He soon invited her to move to Rome to work for his communication and image company.

What began as a professional relationship then turned into a romance. Costanzo, who was separated from his third wife, the television presenter  Marta Flavi, moved in with De Filippi and after five years they were married, in 1995.

The chance for De Filippi to break into television came in 1992 when the original choice as presenter of the Amici show, Lella Costa, withdrew after becoming pregnant.  With little time to find a replacement, the producers decided to take a chance with De Filippi, despite her lack of experience, and it paid off handsomely.

The show, modelled on the United States hit Fame, featuring a school in which two groups of aspiring young singers and dancers compete against each other before a panel of judges, proved hugely popular, twice winning coveted Telegatto awards, and De Filippi was soon being offered more television work.

Maria De Filippi survived a car bomb
attack on her husband in 1993

She had another hit with Uomini e donne (Men and Women), which began as a talk show focusing on conflicts between husband and wife but evolved into a dating show.

De Filippi became a judge on Canale 5’s Italia’s Got Talent in 2009, alongside Gerry Scotti and Rudy Zerbi, a position she kept until Mediaset lost the rights to the show in 2014, after which she was asked to front a new show, Tù si que vales.

Alongside Carlo Conti, she presented the Sanremo Music Festival in 2017 and currently presents Uomini e donne, Tù si que vales and C’è posta per te (You’ve Got Mail) as well as Amici, and produces a number of other shows.

Before they were married, she and Costanzo had a lucky escape in 1993 from a Mafia-organised car bomb attack, a response to a number of programmes Costanzo produced focusing on the fight against the Cosa Nostra in Sicily.

The bomb detonated in the Via Ruggero Fauro, close to the Parioli Theatre in Rome where the Maurizio Costanzo Show was filmed, but Costanzo and De Filippi were not in the car they usually used. Their driver and bodyguard suffered injuries but they were unhurt.

UPDATE: Sadly, De Filippi was widowed in February, 2023, when Costanzo died at the age of 84 in a clinic in Rome, where he had been recovering from colon surgery. After a funeral at the Basilica of Santa Maria in Montesanto, he was buried at the Italian capital's Campo Verano cemetery.

The landscapes of the Oltrepò Pavese, which includes Mornico
Losana, give it the look of rural Tuscany

Travel tip:

Mornico Losana, where De Filippi moved when she was 10 years old, is in the Oltrepò Pavese, an area of scenic beauty south of the Po river in Lombardy that is often called the Tuscany of the North, on account of its rolling hills, medieval villages and castles and panoramic views. It is the largest wine producing area of Lombardy and one of the largest in Italy, specialising in Pinot Nero grapes. The landscape is scattered with vineyards and is popular with hikers and mountain bikers.

The Teatro Parioli, part of the wealthy Parioli
neighbourhood, north of Rome's city centre

Travel tip:

The Parioli district, in which the Parioli Theatre is located on Via Giosuè Borsi, is one of Rome's wealthiest residential neighbourhoods. Located north of the city centre, it is notable for its tree-lined streets and elegant houses, and for some of Rome's finest restaurants. The Auditorium Parco della Musica and the Villa Ada, once the Rome residence of the Italian royal family and surrounded by the second largest park in the city, can also be found within the Parioli district.

Rome hotels from TripAdvisor

More reading:

Gerry Scotti - host of Italy's Millionaire

Why Sanremo winner Adriano Celentano is Italy's biggest selling recording artist of all time

The remarkable life of veteran talk show host Maurizio Costanzo

Also on this day:

1443: The birth of Pope Julius II

1687: The birth of composer and violinist Francesco Gemianini

1861: The birth of World War One general Armando Diaz


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Walter Mazzarri - football coach

Former Watford manager with outstanding record in Italy

Walter Mazzarri has coached nine
teams in Italy and England

The football coach Walter Mazzarri, whose disappointing spell in English football as Watford manager contrasts with a fine record as a coach in his native Italy, was born on this day in 1961 in San Vincenzo, a resort on the coast of Tuscany.

Mazzarri won promotion to Serie A with his local club Livorno and kept tiny Calabrian team Reggina in Serie A against the odds for three consecutive seasons, on the last occasion despite an 11-point deduction for involvement in an alleged match-fixing scandal.

He subsequently had two seasons as coach of Sampdoria, qualifying for the UEFA Cup by finishing sixth in the first of those campaigns and then reaching the final of the Coppa Italia with a team that included the potent attacking duo Antonio Cassano and Giampaolo Pazzini.

After that he returned to Napoli, where he had previously been assistant to Renzo Ulivieri, to be appointed head coach in 2009, guiding the azzurri to sixth place - their best Serie A finish for 25 years - to qualify for the Europa League in his first season in charge, and doing even better in his second season, when Napoli were third, their highest placing since the golden days of the late 1980s, when Diego Maradona inspired them to win the scudetto twice in four seasons.

They qualified for the Champions League for the first time as a result and won the Coppa Italia, beating Juventus in the final - Napoli’s first major silverware since 1989-90 at the end of the Maradona era.

The striker Edinson Cavani became
a star under Mazzarri at Napoli

He moved to Internazionale for the 2013-14 season but could not replicate his success with Napoli. After finishing fifth in his first season at the helm he won a contract extension but was sacked in November 2014 after a disappointing run of results.

Mazzarri’s move to England came in July 2016 as Watford, the English team acquired by Serie A club Udinese’s owner Giampaolo Pozzo, appointed him as their sixth head coach in four years, his predecessors having included fellow Italians Gianfranco Zola and Giuseppe Sannino.

He replaced the Spaniard Quique Sanchez Flores, who was dismissed despite reaching the semi-finals of the FA Cup and finishing 13th in the Premier League.  He argued that he had a successful season in that his brief had been to keep Watford in the division despite being a small club, which he seemed to have achieved comfortably by reaching his target of 40 points - a total that in most years is proof against relegation - with six fixtures still to play.

But the Hornets, the club once owned by the pop music superstar Elton John, lost all of those matches and Mazzarri was dismissed even before the season concluded with a 5-0 home defeat to Manchester City.

Mazzarri's spell in charge at Napoli saw the club achieve
its most successful period since the days of Diego Maradona

Mazzarri’s biggest triumph so far has undoubtedly been with Napoli. Under Mazzarri, Napoli become renowned for lightning counter-attacks and a 3–4–3 formation in which the Uruguayan striker Edinson Cavani was supported by Argentine winger Ezequiel Lavezzi and creative Slovakian star Marek Hamšík.

They finished second in their group in their debut Champions League campaign, behind Germany's Bayern Munich and ahead of Manchester City and Villareal of Spain. But in the last 16 they suffered a difficult exit against another English side, Chelsea, who overturned a 3-1 defeat at Napoli’s Stadio San Paolo in the first leg with a stunning 4–1 win after extra time in the return leg in England.

Napoli recovered from the disappointment to end the season with a trophy as they won the Coppa Italia final, inflicting Serie A champions Juventus's only defeat of the season, and finished second in Serie A the following season, their highest position in over 20 years.

Since January of this year, Mazzarri, a former midfielder who played more than 250 matches in a fairly low-key career on the pitch, has been coach of Torino in Serie A, his ninth team since he took his first head coach position at the minor Sicilian club Acireale in 2001.

Sand dunes in the beautiful Rimigliano nature park,
which is next to the resort of San Vincenzo

Travel tip:

Mazzarri’s home town of San Vincenzo is a coastal resort at the southern end of the Ligurian Sea, roughly 50km (31 miles) south of Livorno, almost level with the northern tip of the island of Corsica.  The resort is notable for the long stretches of soft, sandy beaches that are characteristic of the area. It is also adjacent to the Rimigliano nature park, which covers the shoreline between San Vincenzo and the Gulf of Baratti, where visitors can admire sea lilies and juniper-covered sand dunes or explore forests of cork and pine trees.

The elegant Piazza Duomo in the centre of the Sicilian
town of Acireale, north of Catania

Travel tip:

Acireale, where Mazzarri played for a while and began his coaching career, is an elegant town rich in Baroque architecture, built on a series of lava terraces that drop to the sea about 17km (11 miles) north of Catania on the southeast coast of Sicily.  It has a beautiful cathedral dedicated to Maria Santissima Annunziata, located in Piazza Duomo in the historic centre. Built in the fifth century, it was reconstructed after the 1693 earthquake. The nearby fishing village of Santa Maria la Scala has some charming restaurants at the harbour’s edge.

More reading:

How Gianfranco Zola 'learned everything' from Diego Maradona

The three-times Champions League winner now in charge of Napoli

The founding of Milan giants Internazionale

Also on this day:

1450: The death of Leonello d'Este, patron of Ferrara's artistic heritage

1910: The birth of Olympic cycling champion Attilio Pavese


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Gianrico Carofiglio - novelist

Ex anti-Mafia judge now bestselling author

Gianrico Carofiglio was a prominent figure
in the fight against the Mafia in Bari

The novelist Gianrico Carofiglio, whose books have sold more than five million copies, was born on this day in 1961 in Bari.

Carofiglio is best known for a series of thrillers featuring the character of lawyer Guido Guerrieri but he has also written a number of novels featuring other characters, still mainly in the crime thriller genre.

One of them, his 2004 novel Il passato è una terra straniera (The Past is a Foreign Country), was made into an acclaimed film, directed by Daniele Vicari and starring Elio Germano, who appeared in the multi award-winning TV series Romanzo Criminale, and Michele Riondino, who played Andrea Camilleri’s most famous detective in the TV series The Young Montalbano.

Carofiglio drew inspiration and much technical knowledge from his career as a magistrate, which culminated in him becoming deputy prosecutor in the Anti-Mafia Directorate of his home town, Bari.

He was an advisor to the anti-Mafia committee in the Italian parliament in 2007 and served as senator between 2008 and 2013. For many years, he was provided with a police bodyguard.

Carofiglio’s interest in writing was passed on by his mother, Enza Buono, a novelist from Sicily, but he chose a career in law, becoming a magistrate in Prato, in Tuscany, at the age of 25. From there he moved to Foggia, a little to the north of Bari, where he was public prosecutor.

Carofiglio's Guido Guerrieri novels have been
bestsellers in Italy and abroad

He made his debut as a published writer in 2002 with Testimone inconsapevole (Involuntary Witness), the novel that introduces the character of lawyer Guido Guerrieri, who also featured in Ad occhi chiusi (A Walk in the Dark, 2003), Ragionevoli dubbi (Reasonable Doubts, 2006), Le perfezioni provvisorie (Temporary Perfections, 2010) and La regola dell’equilibro (A Fine Line, 2014), all of which have been published in English.

The Guerrieri novels also formed the basis for a TV series in Italy.

Carofiglio enjoyed success immediately, winning several awards for best debut novel. The Past is a Foreign Country won the prestigious Premio Bancarella in 2005.

However, he did not devote himself to writing full time until he had completed his term in the Senate, after which he also resigned from the judiciary.

Other novels by Carofiglio translated into English include Il silenzio dell’onda (The Silence of the Wave, 2011) and L’estate fredda (The Cold Summer, 2016), the latter featuring a new character, the Carabinieri marshall Pietro Fenoglio.

For several years president of the Petruzzelli Theatre in Bari, he is also honorary president of The Edinburgh Gadda Prize which celebrates the work of writer and poet Carlo Emilio Gadda.

Carofiglio still lives in Bari with his wife and two children.

The Teatro Petruzzelli was once one of Italy's leading
theatres and opera houses 

Travel tip:

The Teatro Petruzzelli is the largest theatre in Bari and the fourth biggest in Italy by size. Built between 1898 and 1903, it became a major venue for opera and ballet and for concerts. A long list of stars who performed there included Italian operatic greats from Tito Schipa to Luciano Pavarotti, Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan, Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev and international singing stars such as Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Liza Minnelli. The theatre was completely destroyed by fire in 1991 as a result of a suspected arson attack and rebuilt, but did not reopen until 2009 following protracted legal battles over ownership.

The cathedral of Santa Maria de Fovea in Foggia

Travel tip:

The city of Foggia was once known as the ‘granary of Italy’, thanks to its proximity to a large plain, known as the Tavoliere delle Puglie, which enabled the growing of wheat and other grain plants on a large scale. There are many pasta factories, although productivity in the area is not limited to grains, being a significant producer of olives, grapes and cheeses too.  The old centre of the city is a network of narrow streets, at the heart of which is the part-Romanic, part-Baroque cathedral of Santa Maria de Fovea.

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Luca Zingaretti - actor

Found fame as TV detective Inspector Montalbano

Luca Zingaretti: famous for his portrayal
of the Sicily detective Inspector Montalbano

The actor Luca Zingaretti, best known for his portrayal of Inspector Montalbano in the TV series based on Andrea Camilleri's crime novels, was born on this day in 1961 in Rome.

The Montalbano mysteries, now into a 10th series, began broadcasting on Italy's RAI network in 1999 and has become a hit in several countries outside Italy, including France, Spain, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Zingaretti has played the famously maverick Sicilian detective in all 28 feature-length episodes to date, each one based on a novel or short story collection by the Sicilian-born author Camilleri, now in his 92nd year but still writing.

Although he had established himself as a stage actor and had appeared in a number of films, it was the part of Montalbano that established Zingaretti's fame.

Yet he had hoped to become a star on another kind of stage as a professional footballer.  Growing up in the Magliana neighbourhood in the south-west of Rome, he spent as much time as he could out in the streets kicking a ball and played for a number of junior teams.

Zingarette in a scene from Inspector Montalbano

He was good enough, at 17, to earn a semi-professional contract with Rimini, then in Serie B, but a scholarship to the Silvio d'Amico Academy of Dramatic Arts persuaded him to return to Rome, abandoning his football career.

Before training to be an actor, Zingaretti had played
football at a semi-professional level in Rimini

On graduating, he began to work in the theatre, appearing in Chekhov's Three Sisters, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan.  He did his first film work in 1987 and attracted critical acclaim for the first time in the director Marco Risi's movie The Wolfpack in 1994.

His profile was raised a little more when he played a Mafia boss in the popular TV series La Piovra in 1997 and it was soon afterwards that he learned of the plan to adapt Camilleri's Montalbano books for the small screen.

Zingaretti was intrigued because Camilleri had been one of his tutors at the Academy and he was familiar with the novels and their main character.  He auditioned and landed the part.

The exposure sent Zingaretti's career to another level, making him the most famous face on Italian TV and Italy's best paid actor.  Although he considers himself Roman in character, he immersed himself in the Montalbano role and earned Camilleri's respect for his authentic portrayal of a Sicilian, while the tough but caring detective, always rooting for the disadvantaged and exploited, won him a place in the affections of millions of viewers.

The city of Ragusa in southern Sicily, where much of the
location filming of Inspector Montalbano took place

In Zingaretti's opinion, the show, which is filmed on location in Sicily, is popular because Camilleri captures the lost charm of the island he knew as a child and because he created in Montalbano an old-fashioned character, dealing with the worst the crime world can throw at him, rejecting corruption and retaining a strict moral code.

Zingaretti's film career has continued in tandem, bringing him recognition among his peers.  He won two awards for Best Actor - a David di Donatello from the Academy of Italian Cinema and a Karlovy Vary Award from the film festival of the same name - for Alla luce del sole, a real-life drama directed by Roberto Faenza in which Zingaretti played Pino Puglisi, a Roman Catholic priest killed by the Mafia.

Married to the Naples-born actress Luisa Ranieri, whom he met on the set of the TV series Cefalonia, he became a father for the second time in 2015.  Their wedding took place in Sicily at the Castello di Donnafugata, near Ragusa.

His brother, Nicola, is a politician, a former MEP and a member of the Democratic Party of Italy.  He is currently president of the region of Lazio.

A beautiful, atmospheric picture that captures
 the dome of the Duomo di San Giorgio.

Travel tip:

Most of the Commissario Montalbano series is shot on location, mainly around the picturesque city of Ragusa, the historic centre of which perches on top of a hill called Monte Iblei. Rebuilt in Baroque style after the earthquake of 1693, it has charming narrow streets, pretty squares and some elegant buildings, including the 18th century Duomo di San Giorgio.

Travel tip:

The fictional town of Vigàta, where Montalbano is based in the Camilleri novels, is modelled on Porto Empedocle, a industrial port near Agrigento on the south coast of Sicily and Camilleri's home town.  Because of the association, the town changed its name to Porto Empedocle Vigàta, hoping to attract more visitors, although much of the exterior filming of buildings portrayed as being in Vigàta actually took place in Ragusa.  The police station where Montalbano works is the town hall in Scicli, another inland town a few kilometres south of Ragusa.

Also on this day: 

1869: Birth of Victor Emmanuel III, Italy's king through two World Wars

More reading:

Andrea Camilleri, nonagenarian creator of Inspector Montalbano

Umberto Eco - academic novelist hailed for The Name of the Rose

Franco Lucentini - one half of a crime-writing duo

Buy Andrea Camilleri novels from Amazon

(Photo of Duomo di San Giorgio by Gdiquattro via Wikimedia Commons)

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