Ippolita Maria Sforza – noble woman

Learned lady sacrificed happiness for a political alliance

Ippolita Maria Sforza's marriage helped
forge a strong link between Naples and Milan

Ippolita Maria Sforza, a cultured young noblewoman who wrote poetry, letters and documents in Latin, was born on this day in 1446 in Cremona.

She was married to Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, who later became King Alfonso II of Naples, because it was a politically advantageous alliance, but she did not live long enough to become his Queen consort.

Ippolita was the eldest daughter of Francesco I Sforza, Duke of Milan, and Bianca Maria Visconti.

She was tutored along with her six younger brothers and one younger sister by a Greek scholar who taught her philosophy and Greek.

When she was 14 years old she composed a Latin address for Pope Pius II, which became well known after it was circulated in manuscript form.

She wrote many letters, which were published in Italy in one volume in 1893. She also wrote poetry and a Latin eulogy for her father, Francesco.

Ippolita was married at the age of 19 to Alfonso, the eldest son of King Ferdinand I of Naples. The marriage created a powerful alliance between the Kingdom of Naples and the Duchy of Milan.

A copy of a 1472 bust by Francesco Laurana thought to
be of Ippolita Maria Sforza

But her husband, perhaps threatened by her high level of education, treated her with a lack of respect throughout their marriage.

Ippolita’s letters from this period display the adroit diplomacy she used to strengthen the alliance between Milan and Naples amid crises, such as her brother’s assassination in Milan and the Turkish invasion of Otranto.

The couple had three children. Their eldest son, Ferdinand, became King of Naples, their daughter, Isabella, married Gian Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, and their youngest son, Piero, died of an infection after surgery.

Ippolita died at the age of 38 in 1484 in Naples. Her husband then married his long-standing mistress by whom he already had two illegitimate children.

Soon after Ippolita’s death, the Naples-Milan alliance collapsed.

Cremona's bell tower, Il Torrazzo

Travel tip:

Cremona is famous for having the tallest bell tower in Italy, il Torrazzo, which measures more than 112 metres in height. As well as the manufacture of violins, Cremona is also famous for producing confectionery. Negozio Sperlari in Via Solferino specialises in the city’s famous torrone (nougat). The concoction of almonds, honey and egg whites was created in the city to mark the marriage of Bianca Maria Visconti to Francesco Sforza in 1441, when Cremona was given to the bride as part of her dowry.

The Palazzo Reale was one of the residences of the
Kings of Naples

Travel tip:

In the area around Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples you can see buildings with royal connections. The impressive Palazzo Reale at the eastern end of the piazza was one of the residences of the Kings of Naples at the time the city was capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The palace is home to a 30-room museum and the largest library in southern Italy, both now open to the public. Close to the royal palace is one of the oldest opera houses in the world, built for a Bourbon King of Naples. Teatro di San Carlo was officially opened on 4 November 1737, way ahead of La Scala in Milan and La Fenice in Venice. In the magnificent auditorium, the focal point is the royal box surmounted by the crown of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

More reading:

Bianca Maria Visconti - powerful woman who ran Milan

How the despotic Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies ruled for 65 years

Ludovico III Gonzaga - 15th century ruler of Mantua

Also on this day:

1480: The birth of the notorious beauty Lucrezia Borgia

1911: The birth of car maker Ilario Bandini

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Niccolò Piccinni – opera composer

Writer drawn into 18^th century Paris rivalry

Niccolò Piccinni was one of Italy's most
popular composers in the 18th century

The composer Niccolò Piccinni, one of the most popular writers of opera in 18^th century Europe, was born on this day in 1728 in Bari.

Piccinni, who lived mainly in Naples while he was in Italy, had the misfortune to be placed under house arrest for four years in his 60s, when he was accused of being a republican revolutionary.

He is primarily remembered, though, for having been invited to Paris at the height of his popularity to be drawn unwittingly into a battle between supporters of traditional opera, with its emphasis on catchy melodies and show-stopping arias, and those of the German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck, who favoured solemnly serious storytelling more akin to Greek tragedy.

Piccinni’s father was a musician but tried to discourage his son from following the same career. However, the Bishop of Bari, recognising Niccolò’s talent, arranged for him to attend the Conservatorio di Sant’Onofrio in Capuana in Naples.

He was a prolific writer. His first opera, a comedy entitled Le donne dispettose (The mischievous women) was staged at the Teatro dei Fiorentini in Naples in 1755 and after he had formed a working partnership with the acclaimed librettist Pietro Metastasio his catalogue of works was already well into double figures when the success of one particular composition won him popularity across Europe.

La buona figliuola (The good daughter), also known as La Cecchina, was essentially an opera buffa – a light-hearted comedy – for which the libretto was written by the famous playwright Carlo Goldoni.

Carlo Goldoni, the Venetian playwright, wrote
the libretto for Piccinni's first major success

It premiered at the Teatro delle Dame in Rome in 1760 and was so popular it enjoyed a two-year run, acquiring such a reputation as a crowd pleaser that it was soon attracting packed houses in every capital city in Europe.  What set it apart was that it was a comedy with dramatic elements and a soft sentimentality designed to touch the emotions of the audience.

The public enthusiasm for the story was such that a commercial spin-off industry developed around it almost in the manner of box-office successes of today, with fashion houses and shops trading on the La Cecchina name.

The new sentimental style caught on with other composers, eager to match Piccinni’s success, but at the same time there was a backlash among conservatives, who felt music, and opera in particular, should be about strength and manliness and saw this brand of modern Italian music as rather effete, promoting effeminacy and cowardliness rather than courage and moral virtue.

Among those composers who had their support was Gluck, the German who had found favour with the Hapsburg court in Vienna.  Gluck moved to Paris in the 1770s and when Queen Marie Antoinette invited Piccinni to live and work in the French capital, the directors of the Academie Royale de Musique, as the Paris Opera was then known, saw the commercial potential in pitting the two against one another.

They invited each to compose his own interpretation of the same texts and deliberately encouraged the Parisian public to fall into one or the other of two camps – the Gluckists and the Piccinnists. The antagonism between some factions became quite ugly.

The Piccinni statue in his
home city of Bari

The irony was that Piccinni admired Gluck and while in Paris, excited by the chance to compose pieces of greater substance, he collaborated with the celebrated French dramatist Jean-Francois Marmontel on several projects that he hoped would advance the cause of operatic reform that Gluck and his intellectual supporters were proposing.

The French Revolution in 1789 – two years after the death of Gluck - brought to an end Piccinni’s time in Paris and he returned to Naples, where he was given a warm welcome by King Ferdinand IV, whose wife Maria Carolina was the ill-fated Marie Antoinette’s sister, only to fall out of favour when his daughter’s marriage to a French democratic republican brought him under suspicion of connections and sympathies with the revolutionaries whose influence Ferdinand feared.

The king’s attitude towards any suspected republicans in Naples had been uncompromising and many were rounded up and shot. Piccinni was spared that fate but remained under house arrest for four years.

His fame long since faded, he spent the years after his release eking out an uncertain living in Naples, Venice and Rome before returning to Paris in 1798, where he was received with enthusiasm but struggled to make much money, although with the support of friends he was able to settle in the comfortable suburb of Passy, where he died in 1800 at the age of 72.

Piccinni’s life is commemorated with a statue in the Piazza della Prefettura in his home city of Bari in Puglia.

Porta Capuana in Naples used to be part of the city's
ancient Aragonese walls

Travel tip:

Capuana is the area of Naples close to Porta Capuana, a now free-standing gateway that was once part of the Aragonese walls of the city.  Situated roughly between the city’s main railway station and the Duomo.  The Conservatorio di Sant’Onofrio, which was in time absorbed into the Naples Conservatory, used to be close to the Castel Capuano, originally a 12^th-century fortress which has been modified several times.  Until recently, the castle was home to the city’s Hall of Justice, also known as the Vicaria, comprising legal offices and a prison.

The pretty Via Margutta in Rome, close to where the
Teatro delle Dame stood in the 18th and early 19th centuries

Travel tip:

In the 18^th century, Rome’s Teatro delle Dame vied with the Teatro Capranica for the right to be called the city’s leading opera house, staging many premieres of works by the leading composers of the day. Built in 1713 specifically to stage opera seria – as opposed to opera buffa – and remained a major venue until the early 19^th century, when it was used more often for public dancing, acrobatic shows and plays in local Roman dialect.  Completely destroyed by fire in 1863, it stood where Via Aliberti joins Via Margutta in an area of pretty, narrow streets close to Piazza di Spagna in the direction of Piazza del Popolo.

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Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies

Despotic ruler presided over chaos in southern Italy

Ferdinand IV of Naples as a boy, painted by
the German painter Anton Raphel Mengs

The Bourbon prince who would become the first monarch of a revived Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was born in Naples on this day in 1751.

Ferdinando, third son of King Carlos (Charles) III of Spain, was handed the separate thrones of Naples and Sicily when he was only eight years old after his father’s accession to the Spanish throne required him to abdicate his titles in Spanish-ruled southern Italy.

In a 65-year reign, he would preside over one of the most turbulent periods in the history of a region that was never far from upheaval, which would see Spanish rule repeatedly challenged by France before eventually being handed to Austria.

Too young, obviously, to take charge in his own right when his reign began officially in 1759, he continued to enjoy his privileged upbringing, alternating between the palaces his father had built at Caserta, Portici and Capodimonte.

Government was placed in the hands of Bernardo Tanucci, a Tuscan statesman from Stia, near Arezzo, in whom King Charles had complete trust.  Tanucci, who fully embraced the enlightened ideas that were gaining popularity with the educated classes across Europe, had his own ideas about running the two territories, and did little to prepare the boy for the responsibilities he would eventually inherit as Ferdinand IV of Naples and Ferdinand III of Sicily.

Indeed, Tanucci was more than happy to encourage him to pursue the frivolous activities of youth for as long as he wished while he continued the liberal reforms King Charles had set in motion. Ferdinand reached the age of majority in 1767 but was prepared to allow Tanucci to continue to call the shots.

Bernardo Tanucci, the trusted statesman who
governed Naples and Sicily as regent

It all changed, however, in 1768 when Ferdinand married Archduchess Maria Carolina, daughter of the Hapsburg Empress Maria Theresa and sister of the ill-fated French queen Marie Antoinette.

The marriage was part of a treaty between Spain and Austria, by the terms of which Maria Theresa would be given a place on Tanucci’s governing council once she had produced a male heir to her husband’s crowns.

The new Queen considered herself to be enlightened too but did not care for Tanucci and had her own long-term agenda for Austrian rule over the territory.  She had to wait until 1775 to give birth to a son, following two daughters, but by 1777 had found a reason to dismiss Tanucci.

Maria Carolina dominated Ferdinand, but herself was heavily influenced by Sir John Acton, the English former commander of the naval forces of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, whom she hired to reorganise the Neapolitan navy.

Acton, promising to support Maria Carolina’s wish to free Naples from Spanish rule, was soon appointed commander-in-chief of both the army and the navy and eventually prime minister, much to the disapproval of the Spanish monarchy, who were about to go to war against Britain alongside France.

In the meantime, thanks to Ferdinand’s incompetence and Acton’s manoeuvring for power, Naples was so poorly governed it became clear that something similar to the French Revolution, which had famously toppled the French monarchy, could be about to be repeated in Naples.

Ferdinand aged 22 or 23, again painted by
Anton Raphael Mengs

Not surprisingly, the execution of Marie Antoinette in Paris in 1793 had a profound effect on Maria Carolina. Abandoning all pretence to enlightenment, she persuaded Ferdinand to pledge the Kingdom of Naples to the War of the First Coalition against republican France, while at the same time summarily rounding up anyone in southern Italy suspected of revolutionary intentions.

For the next 23 years, Ferdinand’s forces fought the French in one conflict after another. Obliged the make peace in 1796 when faced with the young commander Napoleon Bonaparte’s march into central Italy, the Bourbon king then enlisted the help of Nelson’s British fleet in the Mediterranean to support a counter march on Rome in 1798.

Driven back rapidly, Ferdinand took flight, leaving Naples in a state of anarchy as he took refuge in Sicily. Bonaparte’s troops soon marched into Naples and in January 1799 established the Parthenopaean Republic.

Ferdinand now turned his attention to rooting out and executing suspected republicans in Palermo, but when Napoleon was forced to send most of his soldiers back to northern Italy, Ferdinand despatched an army led by the ruthless commander Fabrizio Cardinal Ruffo to crush the Parthenopaean Republic and reclaim Naples.

Yet Ferdinand was driven out again six years later when Napoleon’s victories against Austrian and Russian forces in the north allowed him to send another army to Naples, led by his brother Joseph, whom he proclaimed king of Naples and Sicily.

Mengs painted Queen Maria Carolina in
1768, around the time they were married

In fact, Ferdinand remained ruler of Sicily, with British protection, although protection that came at a price that included granting the island a constitutional government and sending Maria Carolina into exile in Austria, where she died in 1814.

Ferdinand made another triumphant return to Naples in 1815 after Joseph Bonaparte’s successor, Joachim Murat, was defeated by the Austrians and Ferdinand was reinstated as King of Naples and Sicily.

Now completely beholden to the Austrians, he abolished Sicily’s constitutional government and declared himself Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, bringing the two kingdoms together as one, as they had been for a brief period in the 15^th century.

But for all Ferdinand’s attempts to eliminate revolutionary elements in Naples and Palermo, the mood for change would not go away, if anything gaining momentum through resentment of the Austrians. After Ferdinand’s death in 1825 the new Kingdom of the Two Sicilies lasted only until 1860, when it was conquered by Giuseppe Garibaldi’s volunteer army to complete Italian Unification.

The facade of the Royal Palace at Portici

Travel tip:

The vast wealth of King Charles enabled him to build lavish palaces around Naples.  Portici, close to the Roman ruins at Ercolano (Herculaneum), was constructed between 1738 and 1742 as a private residence where he could entertain foreign visitors. Today it has a botanical garden that belongs to the University of Naples Federico II and houses the Accademia Ercolanese museum.  The palace at Capodimonte, in the hills above the city, was originally to be a hunting lodge but turned into a much bigger project when Charles realised the Portici palace would not be big enough to house the Farnese art collection be inherited from his mother, Elisabetta Farnese. Today it is home to the Galleria Nazionale (National Gallery), with paintings by Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, Masaccio, Lotto, Bellini, Vasari and many more.  Charles never actually slept in the spectacular Royal Palace at Caserta, modelled on the French royal family’s Palace of Versailles and containing 1,200 rooms, having abdicated before it was completed.

The Piazza Tanucci in the village of Stia

Travel tip:

Stia, the Tuscan village of Bernardo Tanucci’s birth, is the first large community in the path of the Arno, the source of which is in the nearby Monte Falterona. Florence lies some 40km (25 miles) downstream. Situated in the beautiful Casentino valley area around Arezzo, Stia is a charming village in which the unusual triangular main square, which slopes sharply at one end, is named Piazza Tanucci in honour of the statesman. In the square, which has covered arcades of shops and restaurants along each side, can be found the church of Santa Maria della Assunta, which has a 19^th century Baroque façade concealing a well-preserved Romanesque interior that possibly dates back to the late 12^th century.

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