Camillo Olivetti - electrical engineer

Founder of Italy’s first typewriter factory

Camillo Olivetti in 1930, at around the
time he handed the reins to son Adriano

The electrical engineer Camillo Olivetti, who opened Italy’s first typewriter factory and founded a company that would become a major player in electronic business technology, was born on this day in 1868 in Ivrea in Piedmont.

The Olivetti company that later produced Italy’s first electronic computer was developed by Adriano Olivetti, the oldest of Camillo's five children, but it was his father’s vision and enterprise that laid the foundations for the brand’s success and established the Olivetti name.

Camillo came from a Jewish middle-class background. His father, Salvador Benedetto, was a successful merchant. His mother, Elvira, came from a banking family in Modena but her interests were more cultural. She was fluent in four languages.

Elvira had full care of Camillo after Salvador died when the boy was only one and sent him to boarding school in Milan at a young age.  Although his mother’s fluency in four languages was a help - he learned English early in his life - she understood his inclination to work in electronics.

After graduating from the Royal Italian Industrial Museum (later the Polytechnic of Turin) with a diploma in industrial engineering, Camillo broadened his knowledge by travelling. He spent more than a year in London working in an industry that produced electrical instrumentation and later went to the United States with his former university professor, Galileo Ferraris, who in Chicago in 1893 introduced him to his hero, Thomas Edison.

The first Olivetti typewriter, the M1, which Camillo
designed himself for production at the Ivrea factory

Olivetti remained in the United States after Ferraris returned to Italy, taking up a position as electrotechnical assistant at Stanford University. 

Back in Italy in 1894, he teamed up with a couple of old college friends in his first business venture, importing typewriters, before deciding to go into production with a factory making electrical measuring instruments, entering into partnership with a number of investors.

The business grew, moving to factories in Milan and then Monza to enable increased production, but Olivetti had disagreements with his investors over how much of their budget should be spent on research, so the venture ended.

Taking 40 workers with him, he then moved back to Ivrea and, in 1908, opened the first dedicated Olivetti typewriter factory, a distinctive building in local Canavese red brick.

The original red brick factory was retained when Olivetti
built new modern premises in Via Jervis in Ivrea

The first typewriter produced - from 1911 onwards - was the M1, which Olivetti designed himself based on the knowledge he had acquired in the United States.

At first, production was on a relatively small scale - about 1,000 machines per year - and the business began to grow exponentially only after the First World War, when Olivetti shrewdly diversified into aircraft parts, which were technologically advanced and therefore in constant demand.

When life returned to normal after the war, Olivetti was well placed to expand and developed a much improved typewriter, the M20.  His business model, visionary at the time, included setting up Olivetti branches in Milan and then other Italian cities - and eventually abroad - to provide assistance to customers at local level.

Throughout much of his life, Camillo Olivetti was active politically. As a young man, a socialist by inclination, he was appalled by the what he saw as contempt for working people by the ruling classes and travelled to Milan in 1898 to take part in the so-called bread riots, when soldiers opened fire on protesters, resulting in 500 deaths. Angered by what he had seen, he considered raising his own armed force with the intention of stirring up revolution.

Adriano Olivetti shared his father's vision and concerns
for the workforce and the local community

He was dissuaded from such drastic action but spent much of his life campaigning, mainly through newspaper columns, on the side of the working man.  When the Fascists rose to power, he became an outspoken critic of Mussolini’s regime, taking part in a protest in Ivrea in 1924 following the murder of the socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti.

He scaled down his activities only when he began to fear Fascist reprisals against his factory in Ivrea. At one stage, after Mussolini introduced his race laws, Camillo had his family flee the country for their own safety.

Although he was a businessman foremost, he recognised the need for good relationships between employers and workers and supported the establishment of trade unions.

Olivetti would become a famous name worldwide, well-known for its technical excellence and modern designs as Camillo and later Adriano employed many famous designers and architects to work on their products and publicity campaigns, including Ignazio Gardella and Marco Zanuso.

But the company would also be admired for consistent social welfare policies. When Adriano became chairman of the company in 1938, he increases production to around 15,000 machines per year but at the same time, as the town’s biggest employer, instigated projects that would change the face of Ivrea, building schools, houses, roads and recreational facilities.

Camillo died at the age of 75 in 1943, having moved to Biella, not far from the border with Switzerland, in the 1930s because of the anti-Jewish political climate further south.

Ivrea's cathedral, with its neoclassical facade

Travel tip:

Ivrea, where Camillo Olivetti was born and established his business, is a town in the Piedmont region of northern Italy, about 50km (31 miles) north of Turin. It has a 14th century castle and the ruins of a 1st century Roman theatre that would have been able to hold 10,000 spectators. The town’s cathedral, which originated from a church built on the same site in 4th century, itself at the site of a pagan temple, was reconstructed in around 1000 AD in Romanesque style and, in 1785, rebuilt again in a Baroque style. The current neoclassical façade was added in the 19th century. Ivrea hosts an annual carnival before Easter, which includes the Battle of the Oranges, where teams of locals on foot throw oranges at teams riding in carts.

The Palazzo Cisterna in Biella

Travel tip:

Biella, which sits in the foothill of the Alps, is about 85km (53 miles) northeast of Turin and slightly more than 100km (62 miles) west of Milan. It is surrounded by beautiful mountains and divided into two districts - Biella-Piano and Biella-Piazzo, which are connected to each other by steep streets and a funicular railway. Biella-Piazzo, the Medieval district, is dominated by the magnificent Palazzo Cisterna. Biella-Piano is the home of the Duomo, the pre-Romanesque Baptistery and a museum of Biellese history.

More reading:

Ignazio Gardella - the modern designer with an eye for the classical

Marco Zanuso, architect and designer who put Italy at the forefront of contemporary design

How Karl Zuegg turned the family farm into an international company

Also on this day:

1819: The birth of Risorgimento activist Aurelio Saffi

1912: The birth of award-winning microbiologist Salvador Luria

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Teresa Noce - activist and partisan

Anti-Fascist who became union leader and parliamentary deputy

Teresa Noce, who became one of the most important female campaigners for workers’ rights in 20th century Italy, was born on this day in 1900.

Teresa Noce led a partisan unit in France before
returning to Italian politics in 1945

A trade union activist as young as 12 years old, Noce spent almost 20 years in exile after the Fascists outlawed her political activity, during which time she became involved with the labour movement in Paris and subsequently led a French partisan unit under the code name Estella.

After she returned to Italy in 1945 she was elected to the Camera dei Deputati (Chamber of Deputies) as a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI).

Working with the Unione Donne Italiane (Italian Women’s Union), she secured changes to the law to protect working mothers and provide paid maternity leave.

Born in one of the poorest districts of Turin, she and her older brother were brought up in a one-parent family after her father abandoned their mother while they were both young. Because of her mother’s poor income, they were seldom able to keep the same home more than a few weeks before being evicted for non-payment of rent.

Teresa was a bright girl who taught herself to read the newspapers her mother occasionally bought but was forced to abandon her dreams of an education in order to contribute to the family income as soon as she was physically capable of work.

Luigo Longo was also a communist
activist when he married Noce in 1925

She took a job in a bakery initially and became a seamstress before she was even 10 years old. She joined a workers’ union and helped organise a strike for better pay and conditions when she was just 12. She moved to the Fiat factory in Corso Dante, employed like her brother as a turner, began writing for left-wing journals at the age of 14 and, after protesting against Italy’s entry to the First World War, became in 1919 a member of the Young Socialist movement.

Noce’s mother died in 1914 and her brother was killed on active service during the First World War. She became a founder-member of the Partito Comunista Italiano in 1921 after Antonio Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga led a split from the socialists. Soon afterwards, despite being derided by his parents as “ugly, poor and communist”, she married another activist, Luigi Longo, with whom she organised illegal union activity after Mussolini had outlawed the PCI in 1925.

After both were arrested and imprisoned at different times, the two ultimately fled to Moscow before moving to Paris, where Noce became prominent among exiled Italians, campaigning for better working conditions and editing a number of anti-Fascists periodicals. She also travelled to Spain to support the Spanish Civil War.

After France surrendered to the Nazis she remained in Paris and became leader of a partisan unit comprising mainly Italians, adopting the nom de guerre Estella. After several brief imprisonments and other narrow escapes, she was arrested and sent to a women’s concentration camp at Ravensbruck in Germany.

Noce addressing a meeting of textile workers in 1948

Released in 1945 and allowed to return to Italy, she was elected to the central committee of the PCI and elected to the Italian Parliament.

She became general secretary of the textile workers’ union but her rise to a more senior position in the PCI hierarchy was blocked after he expressed differences with the leadership over policy and found herself shunned by others following an acrimonious split from Longo, who would eventually became the party’s general secretary.

The mother of three children, Noce died in Bologna in 1980 at the age of 79. She had written a number of books, including an autobiography entitled Rivoluzionaria professional (Professional Revolutionary).

The Fiat factory in Corso Dante in Turin

Travel tip:

The Fiat factory on Corso Dante, where Noce worked, still exists today and is open to the public as a museum, with a large number of exhibits, including cars and aeroplanes, outlining the company’s history up to about 1970. Opened in 1900, it was active for 22 years before the massive Lingotto plant came into use, and became associated with the Fiat Brevetti car.  The museum can be found at the junction of Corso Dante and Via Gabriele Chiabrera about 5km (3 miles) from the centre of Turin, near the southern end of the Parco del Valentino.

Palazzo Maggiore in Bologna is the heart of the city

Travel tip:

The northern city of Bologna in Emilia-Romagna, where Noce spent the final years of her life, for many years was the success story of communist local government in Italy. The PCI governed the city from 1945 onwards. Between 1946 to 1956, the city council built 31 nursery schools, 896 flats and nine schools. Health care improved substantially, street lighting was installed, new drains and municipal launderettes were built and 8,000 children received subsidised school meals. The historic city centre was restored and, in 1972, the mayor, Renato Zangheri, introduced limitations for private vehicles and a renewed concentration on cheap public transport.

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Alessandra Mussolini – politician

Controversial granddaughter of Fascist dictator

Alessandra  Mussolini is an Italian MEP

The MEP Alessandra Mussolini, niece of actress Sophia Loren and granddaughter of Italy’s former Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, was born on this day in 1962 in Rome.

Formerly an actress and model, Mussolini entered politics in the early 1990s as a member of the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano, which had its roots in the Italian Social Republic, the German puppet state led by her grandfather from September 1943 until his death in April 1945.

Her views have changed in more recent years and she has become known for embracing modern issues including abortion, artificial insemination, gay rights and civil unions from a progressive standpoint that has more in common with left-wing feminism.

She has left behind her association with the far right and serves on the European Parliament as representative for Central Italy under a centre-right Forza Italia ticket.

However, she is not without some admiration for the policies of her grandfather.  Only recently she caused consternation when asked her opinion on what to do about an escalating Mafia war in the Roman seaside resort of Ostia by claiming that “granddad would have sorted this out in two or three months.”

Mussolini in her days as an
 aspiring young actress

The daughter of Benito Mussolini’s fourth son Romano, a jazz pianist who married Sophia Loren’s younger sister, Anna Maria Villani Scicolone, also an actress, she was taken under Loren’s wing as a child and was only 14 years old when she appeared with her aunt (in the role of her daughter) and Marcello Mastroianni in Ettore Scola’s award-winning movie Una giornata particolare (A Special Day).

After studying at the American Overseas School and then Sapienza University in Rome, where she graduated in 1986 and then obtained a Master’s in medicine and surgery, Alessandra returned to the cinema, winning acclaim for her role in another Loren hit, Sabato, domenica e lunedi (Saturday, Sunday and Monday), directed by Lina Wertmüller.

Somewhat ironically, given her ancestry, she had a part in the American-made film The Assisi Underground, which focussed on the efforts of a Franciscan priest to rescue Jews from the Nazis

She also recorded an album of romantic pop songs, albeit released only in Japan, and twice posed for Playboy magazine shoots.

She was elected to the Italian parliament in 1992 for a Naples constituency as a member of MSI, which would later evolve into the Allianza Nationale.  The following year she ran for Mayor of Naples, although she was beaten by the former communist, Antonio Bassolino.

Alessandra has inherited some of her
grandfather's talent for passionate speeches

At the time she did not shy from associations with her grandfather’s politics.  At an MSI rally in Rome in 1992, during which supporters defied party instructions not to wear blackshirts and give Fascist salutes, she stood on a balcony at the Palazzo Venezia, from which the self-proclaimed Duce had delivered many speeches, and shouted “Grazia, Nonno!” (Thanks, Granddad!) as supporters marched past.

Later, she quit the Allianza Nationale after its leader, Gianfranco Fini, in an attempt to move the party away from its perceived position at the far right, made a visit to Israel in which he apologised for Italy’s role as an Axis Power in the Second World War and described Fascism as part of the “absolute evil” that brought about the Holocaust, although she conceded that the world should “beg the forgiveness of Israel” for what had happened.

When she then formed the Social Action party and organised a coalition named Social Alternative, it was expected she would continue to propagate a far-right ideology, so it came as a surprise that she chose to campaign on progressive policies usually associated with the left.

After the Italian general election of April 2008, Mussolini served as a member of the Italian parliament within Silvio Berlusconi's alliance of right wing parties, The People of Freedom.

In the election in February 2013, she was elected to the Senate for The People of Freedom, which was rebranded in November 2013 as Berlusconi relaunched Forza Italia, which had brought him huge success in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, including an unprecedented nine years as prime minister, the longest-serving Italian leader since Benito Mussolini.

In the 2014 European Parliament election, Alessandra Mussolini was elected for Forza Italia, a position she still holds.

The Palazzo Venezia looks out over the Piazza Venezia
and the Via del Plebiscito

Travel tip:

The Palazzo Venezia, formerly known as the Palace of St. Mark, is a palace in central Rome, just north of the Capitoline Hill. Originally a modest medieval house intended as the residence of the cardinals appointed to the church of San Marco, in 1469 it became a residential papal palace. In 1564, Pope Pius IV, to curry favour with the Republic of Venice, gave the mansion to the Venetian embassy to Rome on condition that part of the building would remain a residence for the cardinals. Today, the palace, which faces Piazza Venezia and Via del Plebiscito, houses a museum. Its association with Benito Mussolini, who had an office in the palace, led to the balcony from which he made his speeches remaining covered up for many years amid fears it would become a place of pilgrimage for Fascist sympathisers, but it has recently been renovated and opened to the public.

Roman ruins at Ostia Antica

Travel tip:

The seaside resort of Ostia lies 30km (19 miles) to the southwest of the centre of Rome, yet is part of the Rome metropolitan area and thus the only part of the city on the Tyrrhenian Sea.  Situated just across the Tiber river from Fiumicino, home of Rome’s largest international airport, it adjoins the remains of the ancient Roman city of Ostia Antica. Many Romans spend the summer holidays in the modern town, swelling a population of about 85,000.

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Alessandro Blasetti - film director

Reputation tarnished by links with Mussolini

Alessandro Blasetti was one of the first directors
to use the techniques of neorealism in his films

Alessandro Blasetti, the film director sometimes referred to as ‘the father of Italian cinema’ for the part he played in reviving the film industry in Italy in the late 1920s and 30s, was born on this day in 1900 in Rome.

In his directing style, Blasetti was seen as ahead of his time, even in his early days.  His films were often shot on location, used many non-professional actors and had the characteristics of the neorealism that would make Italian cinema famous in the post-War years.

Yet he will forever be seen by some critics as an apologist for Fascism, a charge which stems mainly from his support for at least part of the ideology of Benito Mussolini, which led to a number of his films being interpreted as Fascist propaganda, although the evidence in some cases was rather thin.

The son of an oboe professor at Rome’s Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Blasetti graduated in law from the Sapienza University of Rome.   Married in 1923, his first job was as a bank clerk but after a year he began to work as a journalist and wrote the first film column to appear in an Italian national newspaper.

He used his position to campaign for a revival of film production in Italy, which at that time had largely ground to a halt, despite Rome having been a major hub of the silent movie industry before the First World War.

Adriana Benetti and Gino Cervi in a scene from
Blasetti's 1942 film Quattro pasi fra le nuvole 

Blasetti helped begin the resurgence with his first movie, Sole – Sun – in 1929, with a storyline set against the real-life draining of the Pontine Marshes, south of Rome, a project organised by Mussolini.

Mussolini applauded the end result, declaring it to be ‘the dawn of the Fascist film’. Financed through a co-operative, it was not a commercial success yet it was significant in that Mussolini saw film as a way of spreading his message and would later invest much state funding in the Italian film industry.

Blasetti’s early neorealism was clear in 1860, a film made in 1934 about Garibaldi’s campaign to unite Italy as seen through the eyes of two peasants, again with much location filming and imbued with the same kind of visual starkness that would be associated with Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica and others in the post-War years.

It can be argued that several of Blasetti’s 1930s films are critical of the Fascist regimes. Vecchio guardia - The Old Guard - recounts Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome, which led to his ascension to power. Ironically, it was criticised by some in the Fascist government for having too few scenes of public enthusiasm for Il Duce.

Blasetti pictured in 1965

Blasetti, however, did not discourage Mussolini’s interest in his work and took every opportunity to lobby for state funding and support. One outcome was the construction of the large, state-of-the-art Cinecittà studios in Rome, which would give Italian filmmakers the resources to make a real impact.

A marked shift to neorealism came with Quattro pasi fra le nuvole – Four Steps in the Clouds – his 1942 story of a married salesman who agrees to save the honour of a pregnant girl he meets on a train by presenting himself to her family as her husband.

As well as his films, Blasetti’s notable contribution to Italian cinema was as founder of the school that was to become the Centro Sperimentale, Rome’s noted film study centre archive.  He died in Rome in 1987.

Coastal lakes or lagoons typify the Pontine Marshes

Travel tip:

The Pontine Marshes is a reclaimed area of land south of Rome, bordered roughly by the Alban Hills, the Lepini Mountains, and the Tyrrhenian Sea.  It was a marshy and malarial area that several emperors and popes tried unsuccessfully to drain and until the early part of the 20^th century it was inhabited by just a handful of shepherds. However, in 1928 the Fascist government drained the marshes, cleared the vegetation and built new towns, notably Littoria (now Latina) in 1932, Sabaudia in 1934, Pontinis in 1935, Aprilia in 1937, and Pomezia in 1939. By the Second World War the only untouched area was the Monte Circeo National Park. The area is now the most productive agricultural region in in Italy.

Travel tip:

The Centro sperimentale di cinematografia – the Italian national film school - was established in 1935. The oldest film school in Western Europe, it is still financed by the Italian government. It is located near Cinecittà, about 10km (6 miles) south-east of the centre of Rome along Via Tuscolana.

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Pierre Cardin - fashion designer

Star of Parisian haute couture was born in Italy

Pierre Cardin, pictured in 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The trademark Pierre Cardin
bubble dress of the 1950s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pierre Cardin logo is known the world over

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travel tip:

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

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Giovanni Gentile – philosopher

The principal intellectual spokesman for fascism

Giovanni Gentile wrote part of The Doctrine
of Fascism for Benito Mussolini

Giovanni Gentile, a major figure in Italian idealist philosophy, was born on this day in 1875 in Castelvetrano in Sicily.

Known as ‘the philosopher of Fascism’, Gentile was the ghostwriter of part of Benito Mussolini’s The Doctrine of Fascism in 1932. His own ‘actual idealism’ was strongly influenced by the German philosopher, Georg Hegel.

Gentile's rejection of individualism and acceptance of collectivism helped him justify the totalitarian element of fascism.

After a series of university appointments, Gentile became professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Rome in 1917.

While writing The Philosophy of Marx – La filosofia di Marx – a Hegelian examination of Karl Marx’s ideas, he met writer and philosopher Benedetto Croce. The two men became friends and co-editors of the periodical La Critica until 1924, when a lasting disagreement occurred over Gentile’s embrace of fascism.

Gentile was Minister of Education in the Fascist government of Italy from October 1922 to July 1924 carrying out wide reforms, which had a lasting impact on Italian education.

In 1925 he served as president of two commissions on constitutional reform, helping to lay the foundations of the Fascist corporate state.

Gentile is buried in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence

After acting as president of the Supreme Council of Public Education and as a member of the Fascist Grand Council between 1925 and 1929, he saw his political influence steadily decline.

His most important achievement was the Enciclopedia Italiana, which he began to plan in 1925 and edited until 1943 and he also wrote prolifically on the subjects of philosophy and education.

After the fall of Benito Mussolini in 1943, Gentile supported the Fascist Social Republic established by the Germans at Salò. He served as president of the Academy of Italy, Italy’s foremost intellectual institution, until his death.

In 1944 a group of anti-Fascist partisans shot Gentile dead as he returned from the prefecture in Florence. Ironically he had been there arguing for the release from prison of anti-Fascist intellectuals.

The church of Santa Maria Assunta, also known as the
Chiesa Madre - mother church - in Castelvetrano

Travel tip:

Castelvetrano, the birthplace of Giovanni Gentile, is in the province of Trapani in Sicily. It is first mentioned in historical records dating from the 12th century. The Church of St John, which is just outside the city walls, was founded in 1412. The mother church, Chiesa Madre, which dates back to the 16th century, is in the town’s main square, Piazza Tagliavia. The remains of Selinunte, an ancient Greek city, are just outside the city, on a site overlooking the sea.

The Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence

Travel tip:

Gentile was living and working in Florence when he was shot dead by anti-Fascists on 15 April, 1944. He is buried in the church of Santa Croce beside the remains of Galileo and Machiavelli. The Basilica of Santa Croce is the principal Franciscan Church in Florence and is the burial place of some of the most illustrious Italians. It is also known to Italians as the Temple of the Italian Glories.

More reading:

Why Luigi Einaudi signed the Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals 

Benito Mussolini and the Founding of the Italian Fascists

How the Republic of Salò was Mussolini's last stand

Also on this day:

1924: The anti-Fascist speech that cost a socialist politician his life

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Gabriele D’Annunzio – writer and patriot

Military hero influenced Mussolini with his distinctive style

Gabriele D'Annunzio: writer and military
hero, pictured in the 1930s

Poet, playwright and political leader Gabriele D’Annunzio was born on this day in 1863 in Pescara in Abruzzo.

He is considered to be the leading writer in Italy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as being a military hero and a political activist. Some of his ideas and actions were believed to have influenced Italian Fascism and the style of the dictator, Benito Mussolini.

D’Annunzio was the son of a wealthy landowner and went to university in Rome. His first poetry was published when he was just 16 and the novels that made him famous came out when he was in his twenties.

At the age of 30 he began a long liaison with the actress Eleonora Duse and started writing plays for her. But his writing failed to pay for his extravagant lifestyle and he had to flee to France in 1910 because of his debts.

After Italy entered the First World War, D’Annunzio returned and plunged into the fighting, losing an eye during combat while serving with the air force. He became famous for his bold, individual actions, such as his daring flight over Vienna to drop thousands of propaganda leaflets and his surprise attack on the Austrian fleet with power boats when they were moored at Buccari Bay in what is now Croatia.

Eleonora Duse, the actress with
whom D'Annunzio had a long affair

In 1919, with about 300 supporters, he occupied the port of Fiume, now Rijeka, whose population was mostly Italian. D’Annunzio believed it belonged to Italy but the Italian Government and the Allies were proposing to incorporate it into the new state of Yugoslavia.

He ruled Fiume as a dictator until December 1920. Some of his slogans and the tactics he used while he was leader there were later copied by Mussolini.

After Italian forces made him abdicate he retired to his home at Gardone Riviera to write .In 1922 he was pushed out of a window by an unknown assailant but, although badly injured, he survived the fall.

He was given the hereditary title of Principe di Montenevoso by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1924.

Next to his house he built a stadium, Il Vittoriale degli Italiani, to display his torpedo boat and the aircraft in which he flew over Vienna. A mausoleum was built there after his death in 1938 to contain his remains.

The amphitheatre at Il Vittoriale degli Italiani, the stadium
D'Annunzio built next to his home overlooking Lake Garda

Travel tip:

Il Vittoriale degli italiani, The Shrine of Italian Victories, is an estate in the hillside above the town of Gardone Riviera, overlooking Lake Garda in the province of Brescia. D’Annunzio began planning the estate in 1921 with architect Giancarlo Maroni. Jutting out of the hillside is the cruiser, Puglia, its bow pointing symbolically in the direction of the Adriatic, as though ready to conquer the Dalmatian shores. Now a national monument, the estate houses a military museum and library and is a popular tourist destination.

Gabriele D'Annunzio's former house in Pescara is now a
museum dedicated to the writer's life

Travel tip:

The birthplace of Gabriele D’Annunzio in Corso Manthonè in Pescara is now the Museo Casa Natale Gabriele D’Annunzio. The house at number 116, where he spent his childhood, displays furniture, documents and photographs illustrating the writer’s life. It is open to visitors every morning from 9 am to 1.30 pm. For more information, click here.

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More reading:

The founding of Mussolini's Fascist Party

The abdication of Victor Emmanuel III

Why Eleonora Duse is seen as one of Italy's greatest acting talents

Also on this day:

1501: The birth of doctor and botanist Pietro Andrea Mattioli

1921: The birth of Fiat patriarch Gianni Agnelli


(Picture credits: Amphitheatre by BlueSky2012; museum by RaBoe001; via Wikimedia Commons)

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