Ondina Valla - ground-breaking athlete

Italy’s first female Olympic champion

Ondina Valla broke new
ground for women in sport

Trebisonda ‘Ondina’ Valla, the first Italian woman to win an Olympic gold medal, was born on this day in 1916 in Bologna.

Known as Ondina reputedly after a journalist misspelled her unusual name, Valla won the 80m at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where she also set a world record time in the semi-final.

The victory established Valla as an icon for Italy’s Fascist regime and as a heroine for Italian girls with sporting ambitions, her success breaking new ground for women in the face of considerable opposition to female participation in sport.

The Catholic Church’s attitude was that sport was not compatible with the standards of morality, modesty and domesticity it expected of women, while the view of Italy’s medical profession was that women should take only basic physical exercise if they wanted to maintain the level of health required for motherhood.

Benito Mussolini initially saw women as occupying a traditional role in the society he envisaged for the fascist ideal, supporting her husband and caring for his children within the family unit.

But he seized upon Valla’s success as a political opportunity, keen to portray her as an example of Italian Fascism’s dynamism and the potential for Italians to make their mark internationally.

Ondina was named Trebisonda by her father, Gaetano, a blacksmith, after the Turkish city of Trabzon, which he considered the most beautiful city in the world.

Ondina Valla (left) waits with four other athletes 
for the final of the 80m hurdles in Berlin

Sporting prowess was evidently in her genes. She had four brothers, all of whom had athletic ability and by the age of 11 she stood out among her peers for her talent and determination to succeed. She and her classmate Claudia Testoni dominated the student championships in Bologna.

Valla excelled in sprint and hurdle races as well as the jumping events and was a national champion at the age of 14.

It was at this point, supposedly, that a journalist misspelled her name as Trebitonda, which in turn was further corrupted to Trebitondina, then Ondina, which translates in English as ‘little wave’. The name stuck to the extent that even her parents began to use it.

She joined the prestigious Virtus Atletica Bologna club and was selected for the Italian national team to go to the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, only for her participation to be blocked under pressure from the Vatican, who deemed it inappropriate for a 16-year-old to travel as the only female member of the team.

By the time the next Games came around, the Fascist government decided she represented their ideal of a healthy, strong national youth, even though she was a girl, and she was permitted to travel to Berlin in 1936, where Mussolini reasoned that a strong performance at ‘Hitler’s Games’ would be good for Italy’s standing. 

Valla excelled in hurdles events as well as
sprints and the high jump

She lived up to his expectations. She won the semi-final of the 80m hurdles in 11.6 seconds, beating the world record, which made her favourite for the final the following day. In a tight finish, Valla crossed the line first, with her former schoolmate and rival Testoni finishing fourth, denied a medal in a photo finish for the silver and bronze. 

At the age of 20 years and 78 days, she was the youngest Italian athlete of either sex to win an Olympic gold, a record that remained hers until 2004, when Elena Gigli was part of an Italian gold-medal winning water polo team at the Athens Games at the age of 19 years and 48 days.

Her Olympic triumph made Valla a popular figure in Fascist Italy and a symbol for Italian girls, helping to soften hostility towards women's participation in sport. The government were not slow to see the propaganda value of female athletic success, as they already did for the successes of male athletes.

In all, Valla won 15 national championships in different events, set a national high jump record that stood for 15 years and took three titles at the University Sports World Games in Tokyo. Back problems largely forced her out of further competition at the highest level, but led her into a new life.

Guglielmo De Lucchi, the back
specialist who Valla married

The orthopaedic specialist she consulted in a clinic of the Rizzoli Institute in Bologna in 1943 was a former high jumper, Guglielmo De Lucchi. He was seven years’ her senior but they were immediately attracted to one another and, a year later, were married, spending their honeymoon on a cycling holiday between Bologna and his hometown, Padua.

After they were married, she quit athletics and gave birth to a son, Luigi, in 1945, their only child. Guglielmo’s career took to Pescara on the Adriatic coast and then Chieti in Abruzzo before they settled in the capital of that region, L’Aquila, in 1955.

Sadly, Guglielmo died in 1964 at the age of just 56. Ondina lived for a further 42 years, passing away at the age of 90, spending her final years living with Luigi and his wife Gabriella, enjoying the company of her grandchildren, Claudio and Roberto.

She suffered a blow in 1978 when burglars stole her Olympic gold medal. It was never returned, but Italian athletics chief Primo Nebiolo, the Italian who would go on to be president of the IAAF, the world federation of athletics, arranged for an exact replica to be produced.

The attractive Piazza del Duomo is one of
the main squares in L'Aquila

Travel tip:

The capital of the Abruzzo region, L’Aquila was built in the 13th century on a hill within the valley of the Aterno river. Its construction was started by Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, and completed by his son, Conrad IV of Germany. It was destroyed by Conrad’s brother, Manfred in 1259, but rebuilt by Charles I of Anjou, who surrounded it with walls.  The city suffered a devastating earthquake in 2009, which cost the lives of more than 300 people. Many of the buildings badly damaged by the earhquake have been restored, including the 12th century Basilica di Santa Maria di Collemaggio, with its distinctive exterior of alternating pink and white stone blocks, and the 15th century Basilica of San Bernardino, which reopened in 2015 after six years of restoration work that cost around €40 million.

Piazza Maggiore, pictured here at night, is the
beating heart of the city of Bologna

Travel tip:

The history of Bologna, Ondina Valla’s home city, can be traced back to 1,000BC or possibly earlier, with a settlement that was developed into an urban area by the Etruscans, the Celts and the Romans.  The University of Bologna, the oldest in the world, was founded in 1088.  Bologna's city centre, which has undergone substantial restoration since the 1970s, is one of the largest and best preserved historical centres in Italy, characterised by 38km (24 miles) of walkways protected by porticoes.  At the heart of the city is the beautiful Piazza Maggiore, dominated by the Gothic Basilica of San Petronio, which at 132m long, 66m wide and with a facade that touches 51m at its tallest, is the 10th largest church in the world and the largest built in brick.

Also on this day:

1470: The birth of poet and scholar Pietro Bembo

1537: The birth of anatomist and physiologist Hieronymous Fabricius

1943: The birth of singer Al Bano

1967: The birth of film director Gabriele Muccino

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Sara Simeoni - high jumper

Held world record and won Olympic gold

Sara Simeoni won the Olympic gold
medal in 1980 in Moscow

The high jumper Sara Simeoni, who is regarded as one of Italy’s greatest female athletes, was born on this day in 1953 in Rivoli Veronese, a village about 20km (12 miles) northwest of Verona.

Only the second woman to clear two metres, she won the gold medal in her event at the Moscow Olympics of 1980, setting a Games record in the process.

The Moscow Games was boycotted by 66 countries in protest at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, yet Simeoni, who competed under the Olympic flag after Italy left the issue of participation up to individual athletes, still deserved applause as the only winner in the women’s track and field programme not from an Eastern Bloc country.

She confessed later that she suffered a panic attack just before the final in the Lenin Stadium and was physically sick, but then reminded herself that she was the world record holder and eventually beat the Polish jumper Urszula Kielan with a leap of 1.97m, an Olympic record.

A great friend of the late Pietro Mennea, another 1980 Olympic champion from whom she drew inspiration, she had won the silver medal in Montreal in 1976 and did so again in Los Angeles in 1984.

Simeoni won nine other major international championships, including the European indoor title four times, and after clearing 2.01m in Brescia in 1978 held the Italian high jump record for 29 years.

Simeoni wanted to be a dancer but was
told she was too tall

An advocate for the Fosbury Flop style of high jumping, in which the jumper approaches the bar on a curving run and jumps head first and legs last, with the back facing downwards, Simeoni took up athletics first of all as a way to spend time with her friends outside school.

She had wanted to be a dancer, but at 1.78m (5ft 10ins) and with size 41 shoes (UK equivalent size 8), she was physically better suited to other pursuits. When she began to practise the high jump aged 13, it was clear she had talent. She won the Italian national championships for the first time in 1970 and defended the title successfully for 10 years in a row before being beaten by Sandra Dini in 1981. Simeoni regained her crown in 1982 and had won it 14 times when she retired in 1986. She was also 10 times Italian indoor champion, as well as the national pentathlon champion in 1972.

Her first major international competition was the European outdoor championships in 1971 and she was sixth at the Munich Olympics in 1972 before winning her first medal, the bronze, at the Universiade in Moscow the following year.

Simeoni’s first gold medal at a major games came at the 1975 Mediterranean Games in Algiers, which she followed with Olympic silver in 1976, when she was beaten by the East German Rosie Ackermann, who would become one of her fiercest rivals.

In 1977, she began an extraordinary run of successes that brought her nine gold medals in the space of five seasons and established her as one of Italy’s greatest athletes, male or female.

Simeoni in 2013 at the funeral of her friend, the
Italian sprint champion Pietro Mennea

In that period, Simeoni was European indoor champion four times, won gold at the Universiade twice and took the Mediterranean title for a second time as well as becoming European outdoor champion in 1978 and fulfilling her Olympic dream in 1980.

Winning the European title in Prague in August 1978, she matched the world record mark of 2.01m she had set in Brescia only a few weeks earlier.

He silver medal at the 1984 Olympics was considered a personal triumph, even though she was beaten by West Germany’s Ulrike Meyfarth in the final.  Simeoni had struggled with tendon injuries over the preceding two years and was not expected to do particularly well.  The Italian Olympic Committee, recognising her career achievements, asked her to carry the Italian flag at the opening ceremony.

Once she began competing, however, the instincts that had enabled her to win so many medals kicked in and she pushed Meyfarth all the way, clearing two metres for the first time in six years.

Simeoni married her coach, Ermino Azzaro, and they have a son, Roberto, who is also a high jumper.

After giving up competition, Simeoni became a teacher at a middle school in Garda, on the lake of the same name, as well as an ambassador for young people and women’s rights. In 2020 she was lecturing in motor sciences at the University of Chieti in the Abruzzo region of central Italy.

A view over Rivoli Veronese

Travel tip:

Rivoli Veronese, a village on a hill on the banks of the Adige river, is famous as the scene of the Battle of Rivoli in January 1797, in which Napoleon inflicted a decisive defeat upon the Austrians. The famous Paris street Rue de Rivoli, which extends from Place de la Concorde almost to Place de la Bastille, 3.8km (2.4 miles) to the southeast, passing the Jardin des Tuileries and the Louvre.   In military history, the area has always been seen as a formidable obstacle.

The waterfront at Garda on Lake Garda

Travel tip:

The popular resort of Garda is one of the main resorts on the southern end of the lake that bears its name. Garda shows traces of habitation over many centuries, from the Venetian merchants' villas to rock etchings in the hills above the town.  Santa Maria Assunta, the parish church, originally dates from the 6th-7th century but was not completed until 1764. A rebuilding project in 1530 was abandoned due to lack of funds.

More reading:

Pietro Mennea - the Italian won became one of the world's best sprinters

The long-distance feats of Alberto Cova

How Raimondo d'Inzeo competed in eight consecutive Olympics

Also on this day:

1798: The death of the brilliant Venetian painter Canaletto

1937: The birth of chef Antonio Carluccio

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Maurizio and Giorgio Damilano – race walkers

Maurizio won Olympic gold in Moscow

Maurizio celebrates after his victory in the 1987 World
Championships in Rotterdam

Twins Maurizio and Giorgio Damilano celebrate their 61st birthdays today. 

The former race walkers were born on this day in 1957 in Scarnafigi in the province of Cuneo in Piedmont.

Maurizio won the gold medal at the 1980 Moscow Olympics in the 20km race walk, while his brother, Giorgio, finished 11th.

In sympathy with the American-led boycott of the Moscow Games following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Italian athletes competed under the Olympic flag rather than the Italian tricolore.

Damilano was one of eight Italians to win gold medals in Moscow.

Giorgio was less successful than Maurizio, but did win the 20km race walk at the 1979 Italian Athletics Championships.

The brothers - Maurizio is wearing number
one in this picture - often raced each other

Maurizio was also the 1987 and 1991 World Champion in the 20km race walk. He had 60 caps for representing the national team between 1977 and 1992. He was supported through much of his career by the Italian car manufacturer, Fiat.

He also achieved a world record for the 30km race walk in 1992 with a time of 2:01:44.1, which he set in Cuneo.

Maurizio won two more Olympic medals, picking up the bronze medal for the 20km race walk at both the 1984 Games in Los Angeles and the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, South Korea.

After retiring from competition, Maurizio and Giorgio became coaches at the Saluzzo Race Walking School, created by the town of Saluzzo in Piedmont in 2002.

In 2001, they founded Fitwalking, a programme that focuses on the physical and psychological benefits of walking for an improvement in the quality of life.

Maurizio and Giorgio’s older brother, Sandro, who is 68, was coach to Italy’s national athletics team until 2011. He has also coached Chinese athletes in race walking.

Cuneo in wintertime with Monte
Bisalta in the background

Travel tip:

Scarnafigi, where the Damilano brothers were born, is a village in the province of Cuneo, about 25km (16 miles) south of Turin. Between 1943 and 1945 the city of Cuneo was one of the main centres for partisan resistance against the German occupation of Italy.

The Piazza Risorgimento in Saluzzo

Travel tip:

Saluzzo, where the Damilano brothers have established a race walking school, is a town built on a hill in the province of Cuneo. One of the most important sights is the Duomo, a late Gothic building constructed at the end of the 15th century. Saluzzo was the birthplace of typographer Giambattista Bodoni and Carla Alberto Dalla Chiesa, a military commander assassinated by the Sicilian mafia in Palermo in 1982.

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Emilio Lunghi - athlete

Italy's first Olympic medallist 

Emilio Lunghi in his Sport Pedestre
Genova club vest

Emilio Lunghi, a middle-distance runner who was the first to win an Olympic medal in the colours of Italy, was born on this day in 1886 in Genoa.

Competing in the 800 metres at the 1908 Olympic Games in London, Lunghi took the silver medal behind the American Mel Sheppard. In a fast-paced final, Lunghi's time was 1 minute 54.2 seconds, which was 1.8 seconds faster than the previous Olympic record buts still 1.4 seconds behind Sheppard.

It was the same Olympics at which Lunghi's compatriot Dorando Pietri was controversially disqualified after coming home first in the marathon, when race officials took pity on him after he collapsed from exhaustion after entering the stadium and helped him across the line.

A versatile athlete who raced successfully at distances from 400m up to 3,000m, Lunghi was national champion nine times in six events and is considered the first great star of Italian track and field.

An all-round sportsman, Lunghi was a talented gymnast, swimmer and boxer, but after winning a 3,000m-race in his home city he was encouraged to develop his potential as a runner by joining Sport Pedestre Genova, at the time the most important athletics club in Liguria.

In June 1906 in the historic city of Vercelli in Piedmont, Lunghi took his first national title in the 1500m. In the next six years, he was at different times Italian champion over 400m and 400m hurdles, 800m, 1000m (three times), 1500m (twice) and 1200m steeplechase.

Piazza di Siena in Rome's Borghese Gardens, where Lunghi
won the 400m and 700m events to qualify for the 1908 Olympics

The qualifying competition for the 1908 Olympics took place on a track round the Piazza di Siena within the Borghese Gardens in Rome, watched by members of the Italian royal family. Lunghi won both the 400m and 1000m events, the latter in a world record time of 2 min 31 sec.

In London, Lunghi should have participated in the 1500m as well as the 800m, but the qualifying rules were that only the winners of the eight heats could take part in the final and Lunghi was beaten into second place in his by the Englishman Norman Hallows, although his time was quicker than any of the other seven heat winners.

As it was he had to content himself with the 800m, which Sheppard won after deciding to run a very fast first lap and building such a lead that Lunghi was unable to catch him, even though the American's second lap was almost seven seconds slower than his first.

After the Olympics, Lunghi spent a profitable year in North America, where he participated in 31 races and won 27, setting world records at 700 yards, 880yds and 1320yds (two-thirds of a mile).

Lunghi spent a year racing in
the USA and Canada

He had been invited to America by the Irish-American Athletics Club, for whom Sheppard raced. His accomplishments during his time there were recognised with honorary life membership of the club, on whose own track at Celtic Park stadium in Queens, New York, he set the world's fastest time for the 700yds.

His 880yd record came only eight days later at the Canadian championships Montreal.

Returning home, he continued to collect national titles, but his second Olympics was a disappointment.  At the Stockholm Games in 1912 he was eliminated at the semi-final stage in both the 400m and 800m events.

The First World War denied him a third Olympics and at the end of the conflict he announced his retirement from competitive running. A seaman by trade, he helped set up a trade union for dock workers and merchant seamen, his talent as an administrator earning him a role at the 1924 Olympics in Paris, where he was a judge and assistant to the newly-created Athletics Technical Commissioner.

He died in 1925 in Genoa at the age of just 39, having contracted a severe bacterial infection in the days before antibiotics had been discovered.

The Basilica of Sant'Andrea in Vercelli

Travel tip:

Vercelli, where Lunghi won his first Italian track title, a city of around 46,500 inhabitants some 85km (53 miles) west of Milan and about 75km (46 miles) northeast of Turin, is reckoned to be built on the site of one of the oldest settlements in Italy, dating back to 600BC. It is home to numerous Roman relics, the world's first publicly-funded university and the Basilica of Sant'Andrea, which is regarded as one of the most beautiful and best-preserved Romanesque buildings in Italy.

The Porto Antico in Genoa

Travel tip:

Genoa is Italy's sixth largest city, with an urban population of more than 500,000 and up to 1.5 million living along the coastline.  The city's historic centre consists of numerous squares and narrow alleys, while there are also many fine palaces.  The waterfront area around the Porto Antico has been redeveloped to designs by Renzo Piano as a cultural centre, with the Aquarium and Museum of the Sea now among the city's major tourist attractions.

More reading:

Dorando Pietri and the most famous Olympic disqualication

How Luigi Beccali brought home Italy's first track Gold

Valentina Vezzali - Italy's most decorated female athlete 

Also on this day:

1940: The birth of controversial film maker Bernardo Bertolucci

1978: Italy in shock as Red Brigades kidnap former PM


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Dorando Pietri - marathon runner

Athlete who made his fortune from famous disqualification

Dorando Pietri with the silver cup
presented to him by Queen Alexandra

The athlete Dorando Pietri, who found fame and fortune after being disqualified in the 1908 Olympic marathon, was born on this day in 1885 in Mandrio, a hamlet near Carpi, in Emilia-Romagna.

In an extraordinary finish to the 1908 race in London, staged on an exceptionally warm July day, Pietri entered the White City Stadium in first place, urged on by a crowd of more than 75,000 who were there to witness the finish, only for his legs to buckle beneath him.

He was helped to his feet by two officials only to fall down four more times before he crossed the finish line.  Each time, officials hauled him to his feet and walked alongside him, urging him on and ready to catch him if he fell.  The final 350 yards (320m) of the event accounted for 10 minutes of the two hours, 54 minutes and 46 seconds recorded as his official time.

Eventually, a second athlete entered the stadium, the American Johnny Hayes, but Pietri had staggered over the line before he could complete the final lap.

The American team was already unpopular with the British crowd, partly because of a row about a flag at the opening ceremony. They lost even more support after they lodged an objection to the result. 

Pietri, a small man of 5ft 2ins who looked older than his 22 years, was hailed for his pluckiness by the White City crowd, who felt he deserved the gold medal.  But the Games organisers were obliged to uphold the American complaint, on the grounds that the Italian had received assistance.

Pietri races ahead of the field in
the 1908 Olympic Marathon

The outrage at this decision extended even as far as the British Royal Family.  Queen Alexandra had taken a particular interest in the race, even arranging for the start line, originally set for a street outside Windsor Castle, to be moved inside the castle grounds so that her children could watch. This extended the distance to 26 miles 385 yards, which has remained the official distance for marathons ever since.

Inside the stadium, with the finishing line placed directly in front of the Royal Box, Queen Alexandra is said to have been so thrilled to see Pietri stagger across the line and be acclaimed the winner that she joined the applause of the crowd by banging her umbrella on the floor of the box.

When she learned he had been disqualified, the story goes that she was so disappointed on his behalf that she insisted his efforts be recognised and arranged for a silver and gilt cup to be inscribed, which she presented to him during the closing ceremony.

This gesture caught the public imagination to such a degree that the Daily Mail began a fund for him, which the celebrated author Arthur Conan Doyle, who had been commissioned by the newspaper to write a report of the race, launched by donating five pounds.

The Mail told its readers that money raised would help Pietri, a pastry chef by trade, to open a bakery in Carpi. In the event, the appeal realised £300, which in 1908 was a sum comparable with more than £28,000 today.

Pietri is helped across the line at the finish of the race

With that money and his subsequent earnings as a professional – he was invited to compete in lucrative races all over the world, including a 22-race tour of the United States – he was able eventually to open an hotel.

Apart from making his fortune, cashing in on celebrity status that extended even to having a song written about him by Irving Berlin, Pietri was able to use his American tour to remove any doubt that he was a worthy winner in London.

In a rematch staged over 262 laps of a special track built at Madison Square Garden in New York in November, 2008, in front of a 20,000 crowd, Pietri defeated Johnny Hayes, repeating the win four months later.  In all the Italian won 17 of the 22 races on the tour.

Pietri retired from competition in 1911, after a career lasting just seven years, which had been interrupted by two years of national service.

Sadly, the Grand Hotel Dorando in Carpi was not a success and in time was closed, after which Pietri moved to the Ligurian resort of San Remo, where he ran a taxi business until he died in 1942, having suffered a heart attack.

The Piazza Martiri is Italy's third largest square

Travel tip:

Carpi, situated 18km (11 miles) north of Modena in the Padana plain, became a wealthy town during the era of industrial development in Italy as a centre for textiles and mechanical engineering. Its historic centre, which features a town hall housed in a former castle, is based around the Renaissance square, the Piazza Martiri, the third largest square in Italy. Italy’s national marathon has finished in Carpi in 1988 in honour of Dorando Pietri, who is also commemorated with a bronze statue by the sculptor Bernardino Morsani, erected in 2008 on the 100^th anniversary of the London Olympic marathon, at the junction of Via Ugo da Carpi and Via Cattani, about 2.5km (1.5 miles) from the centre of the town.

Luxury yachts in the harbour at San Remo

Travel tip:

San Remo, the main resort along Liguria’s Riviera dei Fiori – Riviera of Flowers – is a town steeped in old-fashioned grandeur with echoes of its heyday as a health resort in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, with broad streets lined with palm trees and luxury villas.  The harbour is still filled with expensive yachts and the casinos attract wealthy clientele. San Remo also has an old town of narrow streets and alleyways and is famous as the home of an annual pop music contest, the Sanremo Festival, where winning is still a considerable career advantage for up-and-coming Italian performers.

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Francesca Porcellato - Paralympian

Life of sporting excellence born of horrific accident

Francesca Porcellato has competed at seven
summer and three winter Paralympic Games 

Francesca Porcellato, one of Italy’s most enduring Paralympians, was born on this day in 1970 in Castelfranco Veneto.

She has competed in seven summer Paralympics as an athlete and cyclist and three winter Paralympics in cross-country skiing, winning a total of 14 medals, including three golds.

At the 2010 Winter Paralympics in Vancouver, Canada, she was flag-bearer for the Italian team.

She is also a prolific wheelchair marathon competitor, sharing with America’s Tatyana McFadden the distinction of having won the London Marathon wheelchair event four times.

Even as she reaches the age of 47, Francesca is still at the top of her sport. Only last weekend in Pietermaritzburg in South Africa, she won gold in the H3 event at the Paracycling road world championships.

The H3 category – for paraplegic, tetraplegic or amputees unable to ride a standard bicycle – involves competitors riding in a lying position, using their arms to turn the wheels.

Francesca in her racing wheelchair

Francesca was the defending champion in the H3 after winning gold at the 2015 championships in Nottwil in Switzerland, where she also took gold in the time trial.

Francesca has been disabled since the age of just 18 months, having been run over by a truck in the driveway of her house.

She suffered multiple broken bones – in her words ‘everything except my head and arms’ – but miraculously no internal injuries. Yet the damage to her spinal cord meant she would never walk again.

Rehabilitation was a long process. It took many years for her to walk with a frame and she was six years old before she was given a wheelchair.  Once she was able to propel herself with her arms, however, she soon became keen to go faster and dreamed of becoming an athlete.

Although competition for disabled athletes was not nearly as well established as it is today when Francesca developed her ambition to race, there had been organised events since 1948 and the Paralympics, which had been originally conceived for war veterans, was officially launched in Rome in 1960.

They have been staged every four years since 1960, and since 1988 in Seoul, South Korea have been held in conjunction with the Olympic Games themselves, using the same facilities and following on immediately afterwards.

Francesca has excelled on skis too

It was in Seoul that Francesca, just turned 18, made her Paralympic debut as a wheelchair athlete.

Her success was immediate, with gold medals in both the individual 100m and 4 x 100m relay.  Noting her red hair, The Italian media nicknamed her La Rossa Volante – the Flying Redhead.

Winning three silver medals for good measure, in the 200m, 4 x 200m and 4 x 400m, she was among the medals again in Barcelona again four years later, taking bronze in the 400m on her 22^nd birthday.

She competed in the summer Paralympics until 2008, also picking up medals in 2000 in Sydney and 2004 in Athens.

At the same time, she was developing as a marathon wheelchair runner, in which she also enjoyed spectacular success, winning in London four times in a row from 2003 to 2006 and also taking the top prize in New York, Boston and Paris.

She competed in the winter Games for the first time in 2006, when it was hosted in Turin, as a cross-country skier.

Her big moment in the winter games came in 2010 in Vancouver, when she won the 1km sprint, a victory made even more special for falling on March 21 – the anniversary of her accident – which she regards as her second ‘birthday’.

Francesca says that she looks upon the date as a special day now because “it was the moment I became stronger – strong enough to achieve a beautiful life and realise my dreams.”

She is married to her coach, Dino Farinazzo, and lives now in Valeggio sul Mincio, a town in the province of Verona not far from Lake Garda.

The western gate of Castelfranco Veneto

Travel tip:

Castelfranco Veneto, a small town midway between Treviso and Vicenza in the Veneto region, is notable for its fortified old city, which lies at the centre of the town surrounded by high walls and a moat. Inside are a number of streets and the old city’s Duomo, which contains an altar piece by the town’s most famous son, the High Renaissance artist Giorgione, thought to have been painted between 1503 and 1504. Next to the Duomo is the Casa Giorgione, thought to have been the artist’s home, which is now a museum.

Valeggio's trademark dish tortellini in brodo

Travel tip:

Valeggio sul Mincio, situated on the Mincio river about 10km (6 miles) from Lake Garda, is an attractive town in the western part of the Veneto towards the border with Lombardy. Interesting sights included the 650-metre long Visconti Bridge, which is actually a fortified dam built in 1393, the Castello Scagliero and the Villa Sigurtà, which is surrounded by a vast area of parklands.  Veleggio is also renowned as the town in which the navel-shaped stuffed pasta tortellini was invented, although Castelfranco Veneto makes a similar claim.

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Pietro Mennea – Olympic sprint champion

200m specialist won gold at Moscow in 1980

Pietro Mennea at his first Olympics in 1972

Pietro Mennea, one of only two Italian sprinters to win an Olympic gold, was born on this day in 1952 in the coastal city of Barletta in Apulia.

Mennea won the 200m final at the Moscow Olympics in 1980, depriving Britain's Allan Wells of a sprint double. In doing so, Mennea emulated his compatriot, Livio Berruti 20 years earlier in Rome.

He held the world record at 200m for almost 17 years, from 1979 until 1996.  His time of 19.72 seconds remains the European record.

It would stand as the world record for 16 years, nine months and 11 days, until Michael Johnson ran 19.66 at the US Olympic trials in 1996.

As well as winning his gold medal, outrunning Britain’s Allan Wells in the last 50m, Mennea’s other great Olympic feat was to reach the 200m final at four consecutive Games, the first track athlete to do at any distance. He also won the bronze medal in Munich in 1972, was fourth in 1976 at Montreal and seventh place in Los Angeles in 1984.

At his last Olympics, in 1988, he carried the Italian flag at the opening ceremony.

Famous for his rather frantic running style, Mennea set the 200m record on September 12 1979 at the World University Games in Mexico City, his time surpassing the record of 19.83, set by the American sprinter Tommie Smith on the same track at the 1968 Olympics.

Pietro Mennea gets down to his mark at the start of his duel
with Allan Wells (left) in the 1980 Moscow final

Although there were some who questioned the authenticity of the record because of the advantages of lower air resistance at high altitudes, Mennea won plenty of races at low altitudes as well.

Known in Italy as “la freccia del sud”  - “the arrow of the south” – he also won gold at the European Championships in Rome in 1974 and Prague in 1978, where he also took the gold in the 100m.

Mennea was born in Barletta, on the Adriatic coast, the son of a tailor. When he was young, the story goes, he would bet against car owners that he could take on their Alfa Romeos and Porsches over 50 metres and win.

Blessed with such pace, it didn't take him long to make an impact on the track. He was a double Italian champion at 19 in 1971. The 1972 Olympics at Munich, where he won a bronze medal, was his first international championship.

His career was not without controversy. After retiring, Mennea admitted taking supplements of human growth hormone, though he added that it was not illegal at the time.

After retiring from sprinting, Mennea drew on the extensive qualifications he acquired as a student, including degrees in political science, law, physical education and literature.  He had been a student at the University of Bari at the time when Aldo Moro, who had been prime minister of Italy and would be again, was a professor.

Mennea was a politician in later life

He practised as a lawyer and a sports agent, working for some years on behalf of the football team, Salernitana. He was an elected politician, serving from 1999 to 2004 as a member of the European parliament, where he lobbied for independent dope-testing authorities in sport.

Mennea also stood at the 2001 general election is a candidate for the Senate in Barletta-Trani under the centre-left Italy of Values banner but was not elected. In 2002 he was a candidate for mayor of Barletta with the centre-right party Forza Italia, but was defeated in the first round.

He died in 2013 aged only 60 after a battle with cancer. Hundreds of Italian athletics fans filed past his open coffin and the headquarters of the Italian Olympic committee in Rome, where World Cup winner Dino Zoff and Olympic boxing champion Nino Benvenuti were among those who paid their respects.  His funeral took place at the Basilica of Santa Sabina on the Aventine Hill, not far from the Circus Maximus.

The Basilica of Santa Sabina in Rome

Travel tip:

Santa Sabina is perched high above the Tiber river, next to small public park Giardino degli Aranci (Garden of Oranges), which has a scenic terrace overlooking Rome. The oldest extant Roman basilica in Rome, dating back to the fifth century, it preserves its original colonnaded rectangular plan and architectural style, which is said to represent the crossover from a roofed Roman forum to the churches of Christendom.

The Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Barletta

Travel tip:

Mennea’s home city of Barletta lies about 60km (37 miles) north of Bari on the Adriatic coast. It is a working port with modern suburbs and an attractive historic centre, where one of the most famous sights is an ancient bronze 'Colossus', thought to be the oldest surviving bronze Roman statue. The identity of the figure the statue represents is not clear but one theory is that it is the Byzantine Emperor Marcian and that the statue’s original home was in Constantinople.  Barletta has a beautiful 12th century cathedral, renovated in the 14th century, the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.

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Stefano Baldini - Olympic marathon champion

Won gold medal over historic course in Athens

Stefano Baldini, Italy's fastest
marathon runner to date

Stefano Baldini, the marathon runner who was Olympic champion in Athens in 2004 and twice won the European marathon title, as born on this day in 1971 in Castelnovo di Sotto, about 14km (nine miles) north-west of the city of Reggio Emilia.

Although Baldini’s class was not doubted, his Olympic gold was slightly tarnished by an incident seven kilometres from the finish when a spectator broke through the barriers and attacked the Brazilian runner, Vanderlei de Lima, who was leading the field.

The spectator, an Irishman called Conelius Horan who had disrupted the British Grand Prix motor race the previous year, was wrestled off de Lima by another spectator but the incident cost the Brazilian 15 to 20 seconds and much momentum. He was passed subsequently by Baldini and finished third.

Baldini finished the race, which followed the historic route from Marathon to Athens, in two hours 10 minutes and 55 seconds, although this was not the fastest time of his career.

His best was the 2:07:56 he clocked at the 1997 London Marathon, when he finished second, in what is still the fastest time by an Italian over the marathon distance.

Baldini comes from a family of 11 children, among whom he has two brothers who were distance runners, Marco once achieving a time of 2:16:32 in the marathon. Throughout his career he has run in the colours of the Calcestruzzi Corradini Rubiera club, based in the town of Rubiera, midway between Reggio Emilia and Modena.

Stefano Baldini (left) passes the Brazilian Vanderlei de Lima
on the way to winning the 2004 Olympic marathon in Athens

He began racing over long distances even as a teenager. Initially his specialities were the 5,000m and 10,000m and he was 24 before he took on his first marathon, when he finished sixth in the Venice Marathon in 2:11:01.

Before winning his Olympic gold in Athens had already taken part in the marathon in Sydney in 2000, having competed at 5,000m and 10,000m at the Atlanta Games in 1996, making the semi-finals in the former.

He took the gold medal in the half-marathon at the World championships in 1996 in Palma de Mallorca.

His first important marathon victory came at the European championships in 1998 in Budapest.  He won the Rome Marathon in the same year.

Baldini won a second European gold eight years later in Gothenburg. His best performances over the marathon distance in the World championships came in Edmonton in 2001 and Paris in 2003, taking the bronze medal on each occasion.

Stefano Baldini in action in the
New York marathon

He went to Beijing in 2008 to defend his Olympic title but after finishing 12^th he announced his retirement, having the same year competed in his ninth London Marathon, in which he also came home 12^th.  By then Baldini was 37, although he did attempt a comeback in 2010 before announcing that he would be giving up for good and concentrating on his work with the Italian Athletics Federation.

In 2014, by which time he had become established as the technical director for youth athletics in Italy, Baldino took part in a charity event to mark the 10^th anniversary of his Athens victory, which made him the second Italian, after Gelindo Bordin, to win an Olympic marathon gold.

Married to the former 400m runner Virna de Angeli, he lives today in Rubiera with his wife and three children, Alessia, Laura and Lorenzo.

The Via Appia forms Rubiera's porticoed main street

Travel tip:

The town of Rubiera was established in around 1200 when a castle was built to protect the city of Modena. It sits alongside the Secchia river and flanks the Via Appia. The castle became a prison at the time the town was owned by the Este family. It was sold at auction in 1873, half becoming private property and half taken on by the municipal authorities.  Today very little remains of the original structure.  The town itself is characterised by streets lined with porticoes.  Notable buildings include the 15^th century Palazzo Sacrati and the art nouveau Teatro Herberia.

Travel tip:

Castelnovo di Sotto, a community of around 8,000 people in the Po Valley, is famous as the home of one of Italy’s most ancient carnivals, dating back to the 16^th century, and the birthplace of Luigi Melegari, one of the founders of the Young Italy movement alongside Giuseppe Mazzini and an important figure in the Risorgimento.

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Gelindo Bordin - marathon champion

First Italian to win Olympic gold in ultimate endurance test

Bordin on his way to victory in Seoul, pursued
by the Djibouti runner Hussain Ahmed Salah

Gelindo Bordin, the first Italian to win the gold medal in the Olympic Marathon, was born on this day in 1959 in Longare, a small town about 10km (six miles) south-east of Vicenza.

Twice European marathon champion, in 1986 and 1990, he won the Olympic competition in Seoul, South Korea in 1988.

Until Stefano Baldini matched his achievements by winning the marathon at the Athens Olympics in 2004 and claiming his second European title in Gothenburg in 2006, Bordin was Italy’s greatest long-distance runner.

He attained that status somewhat against the odds, too, having been sidelined for a year with a serious intestinal illness at the age of 20 and then being hit by a car while on a training run.

Bordin’s victory in Seoul at last made up for the disappointment the Italy team had suffered 80 years earlier when Dorando Pietri crossed the line first in the marathon at the London Olympics of 1908 only to be disqualified. In a bizarre finish to the race, Pietri took a wrong turning on entering the White City Stadium and had to be helped to his feet five times after collapsing on the track through exhaustion.

Relive Bordin's Olympic triumph

Bordin went on to win the Boston Marathon in the United States in 1990, the first reigning Olympic champion to win an event in which Olympians had seemed previously to be jinxed. His time of two hours, eight minutes and 19 seconds was the best of his career.

That year was a special one all round for Bordin. In September he successfully defended his European title in Split, Yugoslavia, becoming the first man to win the event twice, and just 35 days later he won the city marathon in Venice.

Earlier in his career he had won the city marathons of Milan, on his marathon debut in 1984, and Rome, three years later.

Bordin interviewed for a 2016 TV
documentary about his career

Venice was his last major success. In the World Championships in Tokyo in 1991, where he was hoping to improve on his bronze medal in Rome in 1987, he finished a disappointing eighth.

The following year, in Barcelona, his defence of his Olympic title ended at the halfway stage, when he strained a groin muscle jumping over a fallen runner. He was unable to finish the race and announced his retirement soon afterwards.

Like many Italian boys and girls, football was Bordin’s first sporting passion and he played as a goalkeeper for a junior team in Vicenza.

But after he was invited to take part in a cross-country race in his home village he fell in love with running and decided to give up his football ambitions.

He focussed at first on mountain cross-country running and at 17 he was one of the top Italian distance runners. Then came two major setbacks that might have finished a less determined athlete.

Bordin wins the European title
Stuttgart in 1986

The first came during a training camp in Mexico City, when he picked up a bug and developed intestinal problems that forced him out of competition for a year.

Then, shortly after making his comeback, he was hit by a car, suffering injuries that put him out of action for another year.

At 22, he made a second comeback and after winning in Milan on his marathon debut decided to become a professional runner.

At a time when doping scandals were beginning to damage the reputation of athletics – the sprinter Ben Johnson was stripped of his 100m gold three days before the marathon in Seoul – Bordin takes pride in having never been tempted to do anything that could be seen as cheating.

Following his retirement, he did not run again for 16 years until he was persuaded to take part in the Turin marathon on its 25th anniversary in 2009.

He began working for the Italian sports apparel manufacturer Diadora immediately after his retirement and today is the sports merchandising and marketing director of the company, which is based at Caerano, 25km (15 miles) north-west of Treviso.

A church in Longare made in Costozza limestone

Travel tip:

Longare, a town of 5,700 inhabitants, is on the road between Vicenza and Este in the Veneto region, skirting an area known as the Berici Hills of which the peak is Monte Barico. The architect Andrea Palladio used the area’s characteristic Costozza limestone in the construction of many of his famous villas. The area is popular with hikers although its tourist economy suffered after the US Army’s base just outside the town was chosen as a cold war site for nuclear weapons, giving rise to fears of contamination.

Travel tip:

Caerano – or Caerano di San Marco to use its full name – is a largely modern town today but was once a signoria – a medieval city-state – that belonged first to the Ezzelini family, who were powerful in the 13th century, before passing into the hands of the Scaligeri family and eventually coming under the rule of the Republic of Venice. There are a few remnants of the ancient Venetians and some Roman artefacts, but the town’s main claim to fame today lies in being the home not only of the Diadora brand but also the Sanremo and Sanmarco labels.

More reading:

How Luigi Beccali brought home Italy's first track gold

Alberto Cova's golden hat-trick

Why the 1960 Olympics was an historic moment for black athletes

Also on this day:

1725: The birth of adventurer, author and womaniser Giacomo Casanova

(Picture credit: limestone church by Claudio Gioseffi via Wikimedia Commons)

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Alberto Cova - Olympic champion

Los Angeles gold completed 10k hat-trick

Alberto Cova in his moment of triumph
at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles

Alberto Cova, the athlete who won the 10,000 metres gold medal at the 1984 Olympics, was born on this day in 1958 in Inverigo, a small town not far from Lake Como and a little under 40km north of Milan.

Cova's triumph at the 1984 Los Angeles Games completed a golden hat-trick of 10,000m titles, following on from his gold medals over the distance at the 1982 European Championships in Athens and the 1983 World Championships in Helsinki.

He was not able to maintain that form, however.  He was run out of the gold on the final lap of the 10,000m by fellow Italian Stefano Mai at the European Championships in Stuttgart in 1986 and failed to qualify for the final at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, which proved to be his last international competition.

Cova's chief asset was his devastating sprint finish, which could be nullified in a race run at a strong pace throughout but often was not.

He was an outsider when he sprang a surprise in Athens in 1982, when his finishing speed enabled him to charge through to beat the favourite, Werner Schildhauer from East Germany, to win his first international championship title.

His disciplined running style enabled him to triumph again in Helsinki the following year, when the pace was slow and 13 runners were still in a leading pack at the bell. With only 30m left, Cova was in fifth place, but then found the energy to sprint for the line, passing all four runners in front of him and relegating Schildhauer into second place again.

Cova found the field playing into his hands again in Los Angeles.  The final began at an even slower pace than at Helsinki.  With 4km to go, Finland's Martti Vainio began to accelerate but Cova stayed with him and Vainio could not maintain the quicker pace and Cova swept past him after the bell.  Vainio was subsequently stripped of his silver medal after traces of an anabolic steroid were found in a urine sample.

A qualified accountant, Cova combined his athletics with his office job.  He was nicknamed 'the accountant' in part because of his profession but also because of the meticulous way he kept to his racing plans and stayed faithful to his tactics.

Alberto Cova, pictured in 1987

Cova won 14 Italian titles, including five cross-country championships, four over 5,000m and two at 10,000m, and attributes his success to his work with the top Italian coach, Giorgio Rondelli, at the Pro Patria athletics club in Milan.

His successes were tarnished somewhat when, in the wake of revelations of organised blood doping by the Italian federation, Cova confessed he had used the process by which the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood is increased by the withdrawal and re-infusion of red blood cells.

Blood doping, or blood boosting, can improve performances by 5 per cent.  Yet Cova was never punished.

After his athletics career, Cova became involved in politics and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Parliament in 1994 after winning the Olgiate Comasco seat in Lombardy for Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party.

Two years later he ran again for the town of Erba but was defeated this time by the Northern League candidate, Cesare Rizzi.

Nowadays, Cova works as a commentator on athletics events for Italian television.

The Villa La Rotonda outside Inverigo

Travel tip:

Inverigo falls into the area of Lombardy known as Brianza, which extends from Monza, just north of Milan, to the triangle of mountainous land that sits between the forks at the southern end of Lake Como.  Brianza is best defined as a cultural, geographical and cultural region, first settled in the second millenium BC.  Inverigo's most interesting building is the Villa Rotonda, a castle built in the early part of the 19th century to a design by Luigi Cagnola inspired by Andrea Palladio's Villa Capra near Vicenza, also commonly known as La Rotonda.

Travel tip:

Erba, the town for which Alberto Cova stood and lost during his career as a politician representing the Forza Italia party, is situated about 10km (six miles) east of Como at the foot of the mountainous area known as the Lombard Prealps.  Its Romanesque church of Sant' Eufemia has an eye-catching 11th century bell tower and there are the remains of a medieval castle.

More reading:

Luigi Beccali - the 1,500m runner who brought home Italy's first track gold

Why the 1960 Olympics in Rome was an historic moment for African athletics

How cyclist Attilio Pavesi won Italy's first Olympic gold on the road

Also on this day:

1964: The birth of Italy's 1990 goals hero Salvatore 'Toto' Schillaci






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