Giuseppe Sarti – composer

Musician and teacher whose work inspired Mozart 

Giuseppe Sarti composed more than 50
operas in a career spanning half a century 

Giuseppe Sarti, who composed more than 50 operas and a large quantity of liturgical music, was baptised on this day in 1729 in Faenza, in what used to be the Papal States, but is now part of the region of Emilia-Romagna.

Also sometimes referred to as Il Domenichino, Sarti was playing the organ in Faenza by the time he was 13, but he then went to Bologna to study the organ and composition. He returned to Faenza to become organist at the cathedral and the director of the theatre there and began writing operas.

He was successful with his first opera, Pompeo in Armenia, which is believed to have been first performed in 1752. It was seen as establishing his musical capabilities while he was still in his early 20s.

After his second opera, Il re pastore, was well received in Venice in 1753, Sarti travelled to Copenhagen, where he was to spend the next 20 years. 

He worked in various jobs, including that of music director at the court of King Frederick V of Denmark, and he produced 30 operas in Italian and Danish at the Italian Opera there.

After he returned to Italy, Sarti became director of the Conservatorio dell’Ospedaletto in Venice in 1775. He moved to Milan in 1779, to become choirmaster of Milan Cathedral.

While he was there, he wrote many of his operas, which became increasingly popular, and a large amount of sacred music for the cathedral.  He also attracted many students, including the composer, Luigi Cherubini. 

Mozart (above) included an aria by
Sarti in his own opera, Don Giovanni

In 1784 he accepted an invitation to become court conductor in St Petersburg to Empress Catherine II of Russia, who became known as Catherine the Great. He took over the post in succession to the Neapolitan opera composer Giovanni Paisiello, who had served the Empress for eight years.

While he was in St Petersburg, Sarti established a music conservatory, investigated the laws of acoustics, and invented a device for calculating sound vibrations to determine pitch standards.

The Academy of Science in St Petersburg appointed Sarti as an honorary member because of his discoveries.

Among his most popular operas were Ciro riconosciuto (1754), Didone abbandonata (1762), Le gelosie villane (1776), Achille in Sciro (1779), Giulio Sabino (1781), Fra i due litiganti il terzo gode (1782), and Armida e Rinaldo (1786).

Sarti's opera, Fra I due litiganti il terzo gode, was admired by Mozart to the extent that he introduced an aria from it into the dinner scene of his opera, Don Giovanni. Mozart's opera, Le nozze di Figaro, is also thought to have been influenced by the same Sarti opera, which Mozart is believed to have heard in Vienna in 1784. 

Giuseppe Sarti died at the age of 73 in 1802 in Berlin, when he was on his way back from Russia to Italy.

Surviving manuscript copies of some of his works are now kept in an archive of musical works in the Municipal Library at Montecatini Terme in Tuscany.

Faenza's duomo, the Cattedrale di San Pietro
Apostolo, where Sarti wrote his earliest operas

Travel tip: 

Giuseppe Sarti’s baptism was registered on 1 December in Faenza and he was possibly born in the town on the same day. At that time, Faenza was part of the Papal States, an area of Italy that was under the direct rule of the Pope between 756 and 1850. It has now become part of the Emilia-Romagna region, and is about 50 kilometres south east of Bologna. The city is famous for the manufacture of a type of decorative majolica-ware known as faience. It is also home to the International Museum of Ceramics, which has examples of ceramics from ancient times, the Middle Ages and the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as displaying work by important contemporary artists. The museum is in Viale Baccarini in Faenza. For more information visit www.micfaenza.org.

Milan's imposing duomo, where Sarti
composed much of his sacred music

Travel tip:

Sarti was choirmaster at Milan Cathedral, which is also known as the Duomo of Milan, where he taught pupils, including Cherubini, and wrote many of his operas and pieces of sacred music. Milan’s duomo is the largest church in Italy and the fifth largest in the world. Construction of the impressive church began in 1386 using marble brought into the city along Milan’s Navigli canals. Although it was consecrated as a Cathedral in 1418, building work on the Duomo was not finally completed until the 19th century, when Napoleon arranged for the façade to be finished before his coronation was held there.

Also on this day:

1455: The death of sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti

1958: The birth of athlete Alberto Cova

1964: The birth of footballer Salvatore Schillaci

2003: The death of bobsleigh champion Eugenio Monti

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Pietro Nenni - politician

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

Orphan who became influential leader of Italian Socialist Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travel tip:

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

Faenza hotels by Booking.com

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

Travel tip:

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

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More reading:

Giuseppe Saragat - the Socialist leader who became president

The kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro

Giacomo Matteotti - the martyr of freedom

Books:

Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks

Also on this day:

1621: Alessandro Ludovisi becomes Pope Gregory XV

1770: The birth of classical guitarist Ferdinando Carulli

1953: The birth of boxer Vito Antuofermo

1953: The birth of missionary Ezechiele Ramin

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

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Roberto Paci Dalò – composer and film maker

Music maker coined the definition ‘media dramaturgy’

Roberto Paci Dalò has composed and directed more than
30 groundbreaking music-theatre works

The award-winning contemporary musician and composer Roberto Paci Dalò was born on this day in 1962 in Rimini.

Paci Dalò is the co-founder and director of the performing arts ensemble Giardini Pensili and has composed music for theatre, radio, television and film.

After completing musical, visual and architectural studies in Fiesole, Faenza and Ravenna, Paci Dalò focused on sound and design and their use in film, theatre and collaborative projects.

He has been a pioneer in the use of digital technologies and telecommunication systems in art and has been particularly interested in performing arts as a meeting point of languages.

Since 1985 he has written, composed and directed more than 30 groundbreaking music-theatre works which have been presented worldwide.

Roberto Paci Dalò has worked at some
of Italy's leading universities

Paci Dalò has composed music for acoustical ensembles, electronics and voices and has produced radio works for the main European broadcasting corporations.

His films and videos have been regularly presented in international festivals.

Paci Dalò taught Media Dramaturgy at the University of Siena and collaborates with institutions such as the University of Bologna, University of Rome, University of Ascoli Piceno and the Brera Fine Arts Academy in Milan, where he develops projects in collaboration with designers, architects, planners, artists, programmers and hackers.

He coined the term ‘media dramaturgy’ - an extension of the study of composition of drama and adapting stories to actable form to cover not only the theatre but radio, television and film - in describing his own work.

He has been internationally acclaimed for leading the way in multimedia.

As a performer he has also developed extended techniques on the clarinet and with electronics.

Paci Dalò currently lives and works in the hills above Rimini.

The 13th century Tempio Maletestiano in Rimini has
frescoes by Piero della Francesca and works by Giotto

Travel tip:

With wide sandy beaches and plenty of hotels and restaurants, Rimini is one of the most popular seaside resorts in Europe, but it is also a historic town with many interesting things to see. The Tempio Maletestiano is a 13th century Gothic church originally built for the Fransiscans that was transformed on the outside in the 15th century and decorated inside with frescoes by Piero della Francesca and works by Giotto and many other artists. In 1993 Paci Dalò conceived the project Publiphono for his native town, using the public address system of the beach at Rimini to create environmental audio performances along 15km (9 miles) of the coast.

The Piazza della Libertà in the centre of Faenza, the city
in Emilia Romagna where Paci Dalò studied

Travel tip:

Paci Dalò studied at Faenza, a city about 72km (45 miles) kilometres northwest of Rimini, which is famous for the manufacture of a type of decorative majolica-ware known as faience. It is also home to the International Museum of Ceramics, which has examples of ceramics from ancient times, the Middle Ages and the 18th and 19th centuries as well as displaying work by important contemporary artists. The museum is in Viale Baccarini in Faenza. For more information visit www.micfaenza.org

More reading:

The unique style of contemporary composer Ludovico Einaudi

The Futurist artist who invented 'noise music'

How Luigi Nono used avant-garde music as a means of political expression

Also on this day:

98AD: Trajan becomes Roman Emperor

1901: The death of Giuseppe Verdi

1927: The birth of novelist Giovanni Arpino


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Evangelista Torricelli – inventor of the barometer

Physicist's name lives on in scientific terminology

Evangelista Torricelli: a portrait by
Lorenzo Lippi, shortly before he died

The inventor of the barometer, Evangelista Torricelli, died on this day in 1647 in Florence at the age of just 39.

A disciple of Galileo, Torricelli made many mathematical and scientific advances during his short life and had an asteroid and a crater on the moon named after him.

Torricelli was born into a poor family from Faenza in the province of Ravenna.

He was given a basic education in Faenza and then sent to a Jesuit college to study Mathematics and Philosophy.

He studied science under the Benedictine monk, Benedetto Castelli, a professor of Mathematics at the Collegio della Sapienza, now known as the Sapienza University of Rome, who had been a student of Galileo Galilei.

Torricelli also became an admirer of Galileo and, after the great scientist’s Dialogues of the New Science were published, Torricelli wrote to him telling him he had read it with ‘delight’.

Galileo was condemned by the Vatican in 1633 for his beliefs and held prisoner at his villa in Arcetri. For the last three months of Galileo’s life, Torricelli worked for him there as his secretary and assistant.

Early barometers based on
Torricelli's findings

After Galileo’s death the Grand Duke Ferdinand II de Medici asked Torricelli to succeed Galileo as Chair of Mathematics at the University of Pisa.

In this role Torricelli solved some of the great mathematical problems of the day and described his observations in his book, Opera Geometrica. His work contributed to the eventual development of integral calculus.

Torricelli was also interested in optics and designed and built telescopes and microscopes.

But his most important invention was the mercury barometer, which he produced after he had discovered the principle of the barometer while trying to find a solution to the limitations of the suction pump in forcing water upwards.

He designed a kind of vacuum pump using mercury. He filled a metre-long glass tube, closed at one end, with mercury and inverted the tube so that the open end rested on the bottom of a vessel containing more mercury.  The mercury in the tube fell until it reached the point at which the weight of the mercury in the tube was balanced against the pressure exerted by air on the mercury in the vessel, leaving a vacuum at the top of the tube.

The statue of Torricelli in Faenza

Torricelli noted that the height of the mercury in the column varied from day to day, which he concluded was due to changes in atmospheric pressure. In 1644, he turned these discoveries into the first instrument to measure atmospheric pressure.

Scientific terms such as the Torricellian tube and Torricellian vacuum are named after the scientist, as is the torr, a unit of pressure in vacuum measurements. Torricelli’s Law refers to the speed of a fluid flowing out of an opening and Torricelli’s Trumpet relates to mathematical discoveries he made about infinity.

Torricelli died in Florence ten days after his 39th birthday and was buried at the Basilica of San Lorenzo.

Several Italian submarines have been named after Torricelli in honour of his work.

Travel tip:

A statue of Torricelli was erected in 1868 in Faenza, the city where he was born and educated, in recognition of all he had done to advance science during his short lifetime. The white marble statue can be found in the park of San Francesco in Corso Giuseppe Garibaldi.

An example of faience majolica-ware

Travel tip:

Faenza is in the Emilia-Romagna region, about 50 kilometres south east of Bologna. The city is famous for the manufacture of a type of decorative majolica-ware known as faience. It is also home to the International Museum of Ceramics, which has examples of ceramics from ancient times, the Middle Ages and the 18th and 19th centuries as well as displaying work by important contemporary artists. The museum is in Viale Baccarini in Faenza. For more information visit www.micfaenza.org.

More reading:

Galileo Galilei - brilliant physicist known as the 'father of modern science'

How Cosimo II de Medici maintained family tradition by supporting Galileo

Vincenzo Viviani - brilliant mathematician who worked with Galileo and Torricelli

(Picture of faience plate by Rosco CC BY-SA 2.5)


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