Filippo Mazzei – physician

Liberal thinker was praised by John F Kennedy

Filippo Mazzei contributed to the wording
of America's Declaration of Independence

Globe-trotting doctor Filippo Mazzei, who was a close friend of the American president, Thomas Jefferson, died on this day in 1816 in Pisa in Tuscany.

During the American Revolutionary War, Mazzei had acted as an agent for Jefferson, purchasing arms for Virginia.

President John F Kennedy paid tribute to Mazzei’s contribution to the Declaration of Independence in his book, A Nation of Immigrants.

Mazzei was born in 1730 in Poggio a Caiano in Tuscany. He studied medicine in Florence and then practiced in both Italy and Turkey. He moved to London in 1755 and set himself up in business as an importer, while also working as an Italian teacher.

In London he met both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, who would become two of America's Founding Fathers, and came up with the idea of importing Tuscan products, such as wine and olive trees, to the New World.

In 1773 Mazzei boarded a ship from Livorno to Virginia, taking with him plants, seeds, silkworms and farmers from Lucca.

He visited Jefferson at his estate in Virginia and was given a large piece of land to start an experimental plantation.

Thomas Jefferson and Filippo Mazzei
shared similar political values

Mazzei and Jefferson started what was to become the first commercial vineyard in Virginia. They were both interested in politics and discovered they shared similar liberal values, becoming good friends.

After Mazzei returned to Italy in 1779 he became a secret agent for the state of Virginia, buying and shipping arms to them.

He also travelled through Europe promoting Republican ideals, writing a political history of the American Revolution, which he published in Paris in 1788.

While in the Polish Lithuanian commonwealth, Mazzei became attached as a Privy Councillor to the court of King Stanislaus II. The King then sent him to be Poland’s representative in Paris.  After Poland was partitioned between Russia and Prussia in 1795, Mazzei was given a pension by Russia.

While in France, Mazzei became active in the politics of the French Revolution under the Directorate, but when Napoleon overthrew that Government, Mazzei returned to Pisa, where he died in 1816. He was buried in the Pisa Suburbano cemetery.

It has been claimed that Jefferson had a falling out with George Washington over a letter he had sent to Mazzei in Italy that criticised Washington’s administration. The letter was eventually published overseas and in the US.

A plaque marks the house in Via Giordano Bruno in Pisa
where Filippo Mazzei died on March 19, 1816

But John F Kennedy acknowledges Mazzei’s contribution to the Declaration of Independence in his book: A Nation of Immigrants. He states: ‘The great doctrine ‘All men are created equal’ and incorporated into the declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson was paraphrased from the writing of Philip Mazzei, an Italian-born patriot and pamphleteer, who was a close friend of Jefferson.’

Kennedy said in his book that scholars try to discredit Mazzei as the creator of this statement but he insists that it was written in Italian in Mazzei’s own hand several years before the Declaration was written.

Kennedy writes: ‘No one man can take complete credit for the ideals of American democracy.’

In 1980 a 40-cent US airmail stamp was issued to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Mazzei’s birth. The World War II Liberty Ship SS Filippo Mazzei was also named in his honour.

Mazzei lived his final years in a house in Via Giordano Bruno in Pisa, which is identified to visitors by a plaque on the wall. He was said to have been a regular visitor to the Caffè dell’Ussero, a coffee house frequented by intellectuals that occupies the ground floor of the Palazzo Agostini, a striking four-storey Gothic building by the river on Lungarno Antonio Pacinotti.

The Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano, where visitors can
view apartments used by the Medici family

Travel tip:

Poggio a Caiano, where Filippo Mazzei was born, is a town and comune in the province of Prato in Tuscany. It lies nine kilometres south of the provincial capital of Prato. One of the most famous sights in the area is the Villa Medici, designed by Giuliano da Sangallo in around 1480. Today it is a public building housing a museum and the historic apartments where members of the Medici family used to stay.

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Pisa's Torre Pendente - the leaning tower -
is a monument recognised all over the world

Travel tip:

Pisa, where Filippo Mazzei died and was buried, is famous for its leaning tower, Torre Pendente, which is one of the four buildings that make up the cathedral complex in the Field of Miracles (Campo dei Miracoli). The Duomo was the first to be constructed and then the Baptistery was added. While work on the tower was being carried out, a cemetery (Campo Santo) was added. During the summer the tower is open to visitors from 08.30 to 22.00. Tickets to climb the tower are limited and booking in advance is recommended if you want to avoid queuing. For more details, visit www.towerofpisa.org/tickets.

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Amintore Fanfani - politician

Former prime minister who proposed "third way"

Amintore Fanfani was prime
minister of Italy six times

Amintore Fanfani, a long-serving politician who was six times Italy’s prime minister and had a vision of an Italy run by a powerful centre-left alliance of his own Christian Democrat party and the socialists, was born on this day in 1908.

A controversial figure in that he began his political career as a member of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party, he went on to be regarded as a formidable force in Italian politics, in which he was active for more than 60 years, admired for his longevity and his energy but also for his principles.

Throughout his career, or at least the post-War part of it, he was committed to finding a “third way” between collective communism and the free market and became a major influence on centre-left politicians not only in Italy but in other parts of the world.

The American president John F Kennedy, whose friendship he valued, told colleagues that it was reading Fanfani’s book, Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism, that persuaded him to dedicate his life to politics. They last met in Washington in November 1963, just two weeks before Kennedy was assassinated. 

Although he opposed communism, Fanfani’s position was generally in favour of socio-economic intervention by the state and against unfettered free-market capitalism.

Fanfani (left) meets US president John F Kennedy at
the White House in Washington

He even went as far as to write that Catholicism and capitalism were incompatible, with an “unbridgeable gulf” between them.

"Capitalism requires such a dread of loss," he wrote, "such a forgetfulness of human brotherhood, such a certainty that a man's neighbour is merely a customer to be gained or a rival to be overthrown, and all these are inconceivable in the Catholic conception.”

His key contribution to post-War Italian politics was to reform the Christian Democrats, ending its dependence on the Vatican, creating a support base in industrial centres in addition to its rural strongholds, where parish churches served as party offices. He rebuilt the party as one of traditional values, but not hostile towards change.

Fanfani would later admit that his pre-War support for Fascism was wrong, an “aberration”. But he saw the value in the vast public sector developed by Mussolini in the 1930s, realising it could be harnessed as a powerful instrument of political rule, one that would provide employment for the masses when the private sector fell short, as well as jobs to keep friends sweet and to keep would-be opponents on his side.

Fanfani admitted his support for
the Fascists had been a mistake

It was this that enabled the Christian Democrats to establish an almost unbreakable hold on government in Italy that collapsed only when the party became consumed by corruption in the 1990s and was broken up.

Born in Pieve Santo Stefano in the province of Arezzo in Tuscany, Fanfani hailed from a large family with strong Catholic beliefs. He graduated in economics and business from the Università Cattolica in Milan before becoming a member of the National Fascist Party, drawn by the corporatist idea of state control for the benefit of working people, which he believed would eventually take hold across Europe.

However, after Mussolini's fall in 1943, he fled to Switzerland, returning at the end of the War to join the newly-formed Christian Democrats, becoming vice-secretary. Under the post-War prime minister Alcide de Gasperi, he had several ministries. Notably, as Minister of Labour, he introduced policies to build homes for workers and put 200,000 of the country’s unemployed to work on reforestation programmes.

During his terms as prime minister, the first of which came in 1954 and the last in 1987, he introduced reforms in health, education, housing and social security. He improved the state pension and established links to wages.

Fanfani consistently pushed for a centre-left agenda

From the late 1950s onwards, Fanfani persuaded the party of the need to establish closer ties with the socialists, partly because of his own centre-left policies, partly because he felt it would help isolate the Italian Communist Party.

He was one of the instigators, along with Aldo Moro, of the coalition with the socialists formed in 1962-63.  When Moro was kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades in 1978, Fanfani was the only Christian Democrat leader allowed by Moro’s family to participate in his funeral.

Yet Fanfani, though a brilliant politician, could never achieve the popularity he craved within the party, his own downfall eventually coming about through the factionalism that was inevitable in a party the size of the Christian Democrats.

Partially as a result, he never achieved his ambition of being elected President of the Republic, although he did occupy virtually every other prestigious office to which a politician could aspire, including president of the UN assembly and president of the Senate.

He died in Rome in 1999, aged 91, survived by his second wife, Maria Pia Tavazzini, and his two sons and five daughters, all by his first wife, Bianca Rosa.

The Archivio Diaristico Nazionale is in the Piazza
Pretoria in the centre of Pieve Santo Stefano

Travel tip:

Pieve Santo Stefano, where Fanfani was born, is situated in the east of Tuscany, close to the border with Emilia-Romagna, about 50km (31 miles) northeast of Arezzo.  A small town of about 3,500 residents, it sits on the bank of the Tiber river. It enjoyed a golden age in the 15^th century when it was a favourite retreat for Lorenzo the Magnificent of Florence, who brought paintings by Girolamo della Robbia, Piero della Francesca and Ghirlandaio with him. Although the Della Robbia – his Jesus and the Samaritan at the well – can still be appreciated inside the Palazzo Comunale, most of Lorenzo’s art treasures were lost in a flood in 1855.  The town is now notable as the home of the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale, an archive of diaries, memorial documents and epistolary texts established by the journalist Saverio Tutino in 1984.

Palazzo Madama in Rome, the seat of the Italian Senate

Travel tip:

Fanfani’s home in Rome was a short distance from the headquarters of the Senate in the Palazzo Madama, which was built on the site of the ancient baths of Nero, adjoining Piazza Navona.  The palace was completed in 1505 for the Medici family, who had it built as a home for Giovani and Giulio, two Medici cardinals who would go on to become Popes Leo X and Clement VII respectively.  After the Medici era ended in the 18^th century, the palace became the seat of the Papal Government. In 1871, after the capture of Rome by the Kingdom of Italy, it was designated as the seat of the Senate.

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