Vincent Gardenia - TV and film actor

US sitcom star with Neapolitan roots

Vincent Gardenia in Moonstruck, for which he
was nominated for an Academy Award

The actor Vincent Gardenia, one of the most recognisable faces on American television in the 1960s and 1970s and twice nominated for an Oscar for his film roles, was born on this day in 1920 in what is now Ercolano, a town that forms part of the Naples metropolitan area.

Gardenia starred as the father of Cher's character in the film Moonstruck, was the detective Frank Ochoa alongside Charles Bronson in Death Wish and was Mr Mushnik in the musical film adaptation of Little Shop of Horrors.

On television, he portrayed J Edgar Hoover in the mini-series Kennedy, starring Martin Sheen as the murdered former president, but was perhaps best known as Archie Bunker's neighbour Frank Lorenzo in the 70s comedy hit All in the Family, which was the American version of the iconic British comedy Till Death Us Do Part.

Born Vincenzo Scognamiglio, he spent only the first two years of his life in Italy before his family took the decision to emigrate to the United States, settling in New York in the borough of Brooklyn.

Vincent Gardenia (right) with Rue McClanahan starred with
Jean Stapleton (left) and Caroll O'Connor in All in the Family

His father, Gennaro, had worked as an actor and theatre manager in Naples and soon after arriving in New York established an Italian-language acting troupe that specialized in melodramas, giving performances in the city's many Italian neighbourhoods.

Vincenzo made his debut at the age of five, playing a shoeshine boy.  He began playing character roles while still a teenager.

The troupe continued to provide him with a living into adulthood, when his acting ability began to attract interest from further afield.

He became known as Vincent Gardenia after deciding to adopt his father's middle name as his stage second name.  From the early 1950s he began to take roles away from the family troupe and made his Broadway debut in 1955, when he took an English-speaking part for the first time, portraying a pirate in the play In April Once.

The following year he appeared as Piggy in The Man With the Golden Arm, followed by roles in A Streetcar Named Desire and Stalag 17.  His talent for comedy came to the fore in the 1970s, when he starred in the in the Neil Simon plays God's Favorite, California Suite and The Prisoner of Second Avenue.

Gardenia as detective Frank
Ochoa in Death Wish

He won a Tony Award for his performance as Peter Falk's brother in The Prisoner of Second Avenue in 1971.  At the awards ceremony, he gave his acceptance speech in Italian as a tribute to his late father, without whose encouragement, he said, his career might never have happened.

Gardenia's film career, which had begun in 1945 with a bit part in The House on 92nd Street but did not begin in earnest until the 1960s, included roles in the Paul Newman movie The Hustler and director Alan Arkin's debut film Little Murders. 

He was nominated for an Oscar in 1973 for best supporting actor for his role as Dutch, the baseball manager in Bang the Drum Slowly, which starred a then little-known Robert de Niro. Subsequently, he appeared in The Front Page, Heaven Can Wait and Little Shop of Horrors before being nominated for an Academy Award for the second time for Moonstruck in 1987.

Gardenia was working right up until his death in December 1992.  A passionate supporter of the pure acting of the theatre, he was in Philadelphia, preparing for a three-week run as restaurant owner Lou Garziano in the Tom Dulack comedy Breaking Legs, when he suffered a heart attack.

He had retired to his hotel room in good spirits following the final preview performance but was found dead the following morning.  He was 72.

The Scognamiglio grave at Saint Charles
Cemetery on Long Island

The director and cast agreed that Gardenia would have insisted 'the show must go on' in best theatrical traditions and his part was taken by Harry Guardino in a performance dedicated by the cast to their colleague.

Gardenia was buried at Saint Charles Cemetery in Farmingdale, Long Island, New York, alongside his parents, both of whom had died in the 1960s. A section of 16th Avenue in the Bensonhurst neighbourhood of Brooklyn, where Gardenia lived, was renamed Vincent Gardenia Boulevard in his memory.

Travel tip:

Until 1969, the town now called Ercolano was known as Resina, the name given to the medieval settlement that built on top of the volcanic material left by the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius that also destroyed nearby Pompeii.  The existence of Ercolano - the Roman city of Herculaneum - was not known until the early 18th century, when a farmer sinking a well came across ancient marble columns.  Herculaneum was smaller and less prestigious than Pompeii but is better preserved due to the different volcanic materials that covered the town.

The ruins at Ercolano are better preserved than at its
more famous neighbour Pompeii

Travel tip:

The ruins at Pompeii and Ercolano can both be reached by using the Circumvesuviana railway, which encompasses a number of routes including the oldest piece of railway line in Italy, that which links Naples and Portici, which was opened in 1839.  A steam train service to Ottoviano was launched in 1891 and the first decade of the 20th century saw the line extended to Pompeii along the coast, with an additional line built to encircle Mount Vesuvius.  The coastal line was electrified and stretched to Castellammare di Stabia by 1934. The Second World War and the Vesuvius eruption of 1944 interrupted work on the line but after the war a tunnel of 10km was created to link Castellammare with Vico Equense and the line extended to Sorrento by 1948.

More reading:

Virna Lisi - the Hollywood star once dubbed the 'new Marilyn  Monroe'

Triumph and tragedy: the short life of Rudolph Valentino

How Rossano Brazzi quit his legal career to become a Hollywood heartbreaker

Also on this day:

1797: Italy's 'tricolore' raised for the first time




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Giacomo Manzù – sculptor

Shoemaker’s son who became internationally acclaimed sculptor

Giacomo Manzù, pictured in 1966 at his
studio in Ardea, near Rome

Sculptor Giacomo Manzù was born Giacomo Manzoni on this day in 1908 in Bergamo in Lombardy.

The son of a shoemaker, he taught himself to be a sculptor, helped only by a few evening classes in art, and went on to achieve international acclaim.

Manzoni changed his name to Manzù and started working in wood while he was doing his military service in the Veneto in 1928.

After moving to Milan, he was commissioned by the architect, Giovanni Muzio, to decorate the Chapel of the Sacred Heart Catholic University.

But he achieved national recognition after he exhibited a series of busts at the Triennale di Milano.

The following year he held a personal exhibition with the painter, Aligi Sassu, with whom he shared a studio.

He attracted controversy in 1942 when a series of bronze bas reliefs about the death of Christ were exhibited in Rome. They were criticised by the Fascist Government after they were interpreted as an indictment of Nazi-Fascist violence and Manzù had to go into hiding for a while, fearful of arrest.

Manzù's Monument to the Partisan in his
home city of Bergamo

Manzù had started teaching at the Accademia di Brera in Milan, but during the war he went back north to live in Clusone, to the north of Bergamo, in Val Seriana. He returned to teach in Milan at the end of the war.

He then moved to Salzburg, where he met his wife, Inge Schabel, who became the model for several of his sculptures.

One of his most striking works is his Monument to the Partisan, which he completed in 1977 and gave to his home city of Bergamo as a gift.

He built an 11-foot high sculpture, Passo di Danza, in Detroit and his last great work was a six-metre tall sculpture in New York in 1989, representing a woman holding a child.

During his long career he also built stage sets for the composer Igor Stravinsky and he eventually designed his tomb in Venice.

A devout Catholic, Manzù was a personal friend of Pope John XXIII, who was also from Bergamo, and he completed some important commissions for the Vatican and St Peter’s Basilica.

While in Rome he lived in Ardea, south of the capital and close to the sea, in a locality that has since been renamed Colle Manzù in his honour.  Ardea has a museum dedicated to his work.

His son, Pio, was a car designer who is credited with the design for the groundbreaking Fiat 127, the 'people's car' of the 1970s, although he never saw the project completed. Pio died tragically young in a road accident at the age of just 30 in 1969.

Manzù died in Ardea in 1991. The New York Times described him in an obituary as ‘one of Italy’s leading sculptors whose work often mixed religious, allegorical and sexual imagery’.

Piazza Vecchia, in Bergamo's Città Alta, has been
described as the most beautiful square in Italy

Travel tip:

Bergamo in Lombardy, where Giacomo Manzù was born, is a fascinating, historic city with two distinct centres. The Città Alta, upper town, is a beautiful, walled city with buildings that date back to medieval times. The elegant Città Bassa, lower town, still has some buildings that date back to the 15th century, but more imposing and elaborate architecture was added in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Hotels in Bergamo by Hotels.com

Travel tip:

Piazza Matteotti, in the Città Bassa in Bergamo, is the site of Manzù’s remarkable work, Monument to the Partisan, which the sculptor dedicated to the Italian partisans who fought against the Germans to liberate their country during the Second World War.

More reading:

Gian Lorenzo Bernini - the greatest sculptor of the 17th century

Michelangelo's legacy as the greatest artist of all time

How Canova's genius brought marble to life

Also on this day:

1858: Birth of opera composer Giacomo Puccini

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Lucky Luciano - Mafia boss

Sicilian who brought order among warring clans

Charles 'Lucky' Luciano, pictured in Italy in 1948, after
he had been deported by the American authorities

Charles 'Lucky' Luciano, the mobster best known for shaping the structure of Italian-dominated organized crime in the United States, was born Salvatore Lucania on this day in 1897 in Lercara Friddi, a town about 70km (44 miles) south-east of the Sicilian capital, Palermo.

Raised in New York's Lower East Side after his family emigrated in 1906, it was Luciano who famously put the New York underworld into the control of the so-called Five Families and also set up The Commission, which served as a governing body for organized crime nationwide.

After he was jailed in 1936 on extortion and prostitution charges, Luciano is said to have struck a deal with the American authorities to use his criminal connections to help the Allies in their invasion of Sicily, a vital first step in driving the German forces and their supporters out of the Italian peninsula.

In return he was given parole and allowed to return to Sicily at the end of the Second World War.

Luciano, whose father, Antonio, had worked in a sulphur mine in Lercara Friddi, began his life in crime as a teenager, when he set up his own gang and became friends with Jewish gang members Meyer Lansky and his associate Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, who would become two of his most important allies.

He grew powerful during the prohibition era of the 1920s, which created opportunities for criminals to make a lot of money. By 1925, he was grossing $12 million dollars a year and had met many of New York's future Mafia leaders, including Vito Genovese and Frank Costello.  He had also begun working for another big hitter, the Lower Manhattan gang boss Joe Masseria.

Vito Genovese, an ally of Luciano

Caught up in the Castellammarese war - so-called because it involved Mafia bosses from the Castellammare del Golfo area of Sicily - he assumed control of one of the Five Families by eliminating both main protagonists, Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano, after both tried to have him killed.

In doing so he took his place alongside such infamous figures as Joseph Bonanno, Joseph Profaci, Tommy Gagliano and Vincent Mangano - but it was Luciano whose 'family', later known as the Genovese family, had the greater reach.

Yet rather than seeking to make himself still more powerful, he was keen that the gangs stopped fighting among themselves and concentrated on maximising profits. To that end, Luciano sought to create a national organized-crime network to settle disputes and establish demarcation lines between the different operations.

He forged links with crime bosses in other cities, including Chicago's Al Capone, in what became known as The Commission.

Luciano's wealth enabled him to live at New York's luxurious Waldorf Towers, part of the Waldorf Astoria hotel, under the name Charles Ross.

But his luck ran out in 1936 when he was convicted on extortion and prostitution charges, sentenced to 30 to 50 years in jail and sent to a correctional facility in New York State which was known as "Siberia" because of its remote location near the Canadian border.

His appeals against conviction were rejected and it seemed he was destined to spend the rest of his life behind bars, but then came the opportunity to use his influence in New York and Sicily to help the Allied war effort in Europe.

He was contacted by the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, who used Meyer Lansky as an intermediary, for help in stopping German and Italian agents entering the United States through the New York waterfront, which the mobs controlled.

Then, as the Allies prepared for the 1943 invasion of Sicily, Luciano is also said to have provided the Americans with Sicilian Mafia contacts.  In return, he was given parole and deported back to Sicily.

Carlo Gambino, the gang boss who delivered
the eulogy at Luciano's funeral in New York

It was not the end of his career in crime.  Although he remained in Sicily in the immediate post-war months, he secretly moved to Havana in Cuba in 1946, meeting up again with Lansky and Siegel in the hope that he could resume control of his operations in New York from a base closer to the United States.

By 1947, however, his presence in Cuba had been discovered by U.S. agents, who alerted the Cuban government, after which he was sent back to Italy.

He was thereafter kept under close surveillance, although still maintaining his criminal activities in New York via his lieutenant, Frank Costello, eventually helping Carlo Gambino, a fellow Sicilian and a longtime friend, to become the most powerful gang boss in New York.

Luciano died in January 1962 at Naples Airport, suffering a heart attack shortly after meeting an American producer to discuss a film about his life.

After a relatively small funeral in Naples, Luciano's body was returned to the United States. After a second funeral, attended by 2,000 mourners, at which Gambino delivered the eulogy, he was buried in the family's vault at St. John's Cemetery in Queens, New York, under his birth name of Salvatore Lucania.

Travel tip:

Lercara Friddi, which features some remains of a Greek colony dating back to the eighth century BC, was once notable for its sulphur mine, the only one in the province of Palermo.  As well as being the home town of Salvatore Lucania, it was the birthplace five years earlier of Saverio Antonio Martino Sinatra, who emigrated to the United States in 1903 and married Natalie Garaventa, from Liguria.  They settled in New Jersey where, in 1915, Natalie gave birth to their only child, Francis Albert Sinatra.

Hotels in Palermo by Hotels.com

The harbour at Castellammare del Golfo

Travel tip:

Castellammare del Golfo is a fishing town and tourist resort in the province of Trapani on the northern coast of Sicily, west of Palermo.  It is also noted for having been the birthplace of many American Mafia figures, including Salvatore Maranzano, Stefano Magaddino, Vito Bonventre, John Tartamella, and Joseph Bonanno.

More reading:

Carlo Gambino, the Sicilian mob boss thought to be the model for 'The Godfather' Vito Corleone in Mario Puzo's novel

Paolo di Lauro - Camorra boss captured in Carabinieri swoop

Joe Petrosino - Calabrian who became crime-fighting New York cop

Also on this day:

1826: Birth of Carlo Collodi, creator of Pinocchio

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Festival of San Gennaro

Worldwide celebrations for patron saint of Naples

An artistic depiction of the beheading of
San Gennaro in 305

Local worshippers, civic dignitaries and visitors meet together in the Duomo in Naples every year on this day to remember the martyrdom of the patron saint of the city, San Gennaro.

Each year a service is held to enable the congregation to witness the dried blood of the saint, which is kept in a glass phial, miraculously turn to liquid.

The practice of gathering blood to be kept as a relic was common at the time of the decapitation of San Gennaro in 305.

The ritual of praying for the miracle of liquefaction of the blood on the anniversary of his death dates back to the 13th century.

Gennaro is said to have been the Bishop of Benevento and was martyred during the Great Persecution led by the Roman Emperor Diocletian for trying to protect other Christians.

His decapitation is believed to have taken place in Pozzuoli but his remains were transferred to Naples in the 15th century to be housed in the Duomo.

Pope Francis kisses the phial containing San Gennaro's blood
at a ceremony at the Naples Duomo in 2015

The festival of the saint’s martyrdom is celebrated each year by Neapolitan communities all over the world and the recurrence of the miracle in Naples is televised and reported in newspapers.

On 19 September in 1926, immigrants from Naples congregated along Mulberry Street in the Little Italy section of Manhattan in New York City to celebrate the Festa di San Gennaro there for the first time.

Over the years the festival has expanded into an 11-day street fair celebrating Italian food and drink.

The Festival of San Gennaro is celebrated every year
on Mulberry Street in New York's Little Italy

In 2014 a Little Italy bakery constructed the world’s largest ever cannolo, a giant version of the popular Italian pastry that contains a sweet, creamy filling, to mark the occasion.

There is a major shrine to San Gennaro in the Church of the Most Precious Blood in Manhattan.

Festivals are also held in the Bronx, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Nevada and Seattle.

On the few occasions the miracle hasn’t happened in the Duomo in Naples, Neapolitans have dreaded a catastrophe occurring. In 1980, one occasion when the blood did not turn to liquid, a massive earthquake later struck the region.

The imposing entrance to the Duomo on Via Duomo, off
Via Tribunali in Naples

Travel tip:

The Duomo in Naples, in Via Duomo, off Via Tribunali, was built over the ruins of two earlier Christian churches for Charles I of Anjou at the end of the 13th century. One of the main attractions inside is the Royal Chapel of the Treasure of San Gennaro, which contains many precious works of art. The Duomo is also sometimes referred to as Cattedrale di San Gennaro. It is open to the public from 8.30 to 1.30 and 2.30 to 8pm Monday to Saturday and 8.30 to 1.30 and 4.30 to 7.30pm on Sundays.

Travel tip:

It is not known whether Gennaro was born in Benevento or Naples, but he is believed to have become a priest in Benevento when he was just 15 years old. In ancient times Benevento was one of the most important cities in southern Italy and there are many Roman remains to be seen there, including a triumphal arch erected in honour of Trajan and an amphitheatre.

More reading:

The martyred Roman soldier who became Sant'Alessandro of Bergamo

Why Italians look to Saint Anthony of Padua when things - or people - go missing



(Photo of Mulberry Street in New York by Nightscream CC BY-SA 2.5)

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Joe Petrosino - New York crime fighter

Campanian immigrant a key figure in war against Mafia

Joe Petrosino, the New York cop from Campania
who wanted to protect the good name of Italians

Joe Petrosino, a New York police officer who dedicated his life to fighting organised crime, was born Giuseppe Petrosino in Padula, a southern Italian town on the border of Campania and Basilicata, on this day in 1860.

The son of a tailor, Prospero Petrosino, he emigrated to the United States at the age of 12.  The family lived in subsidised accommodation in Mulberry Street, part of the area now known as Little Italy on the Lower East Side towards Brooklyn Bridge, where around half a million Italian immigrants lived in the second half of the 19th century.

Giuseppe took any job he could to help the family, at first as a newspaper boy and then shining shoes outside the police headquarters on Mulberry Street, where he would dream of becoming a police officer himself.

In 1878, by then fluent in English and known to everyone as Joe, Petrosino became an American citizen but it took him five years and repeated applications to realise his dream of joining the police. At 5ft 3ins he was technically too short to meet the criteria for an officer but after the police began to use him as an informant it was decided he could be of use in the fight against Italian organised crime. He was the first Italian-speaking officer in the history of the New York Police Department.

His career progressed partly because of his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt, the future president, who was then a police commissioner in New York.  Noting his success in solving crimes involving Italians, Roosevelt promoted him to detective sergeant in the Homicide Division, after which Petrosino was hand-picked to lead a newly-formed Italian Squad, comprising Italian-American detectives.

Enrico Caruso, victim of  a blackmail
attempt foiled by Petrosino

The Italian Squad was set up specifically to fight against the rise of criminal organisations such as the Mafia and it appealed to Petrosino, who saw the Mafia as bringing shame to decent Italian-Americans. By the time of his appointment to the new division, in 1908, the Italian immigrant population of Manhattan and Brooklyn had grown to more than a million, living mainly in Little Italy, East Harlem and Williamsburg.

Petrosino achieved notable successes in hampering Mafia activities, often working undercover. Famously, he tracked down and arrested mobsters attached to the so-called Black Hand who were attempting to blackmail the Italian tenor, Enrico Caruso, while he was performing at the Metropolitan Opera House.

In 1907 he married Adelina Saulino, the daughter of the owner of a restaurant he frequented, with whom he rented an apartment in Lafayette Street, just one block away from his childhood home in Mulberry Street.  They had a daughter in 1908.

The marriage was shortlived, although for tragic reasons.  Despatched on a secret mission to Sicily in 1909, armed with a list of New York criminals with links to the island, Petrosino was to gather evidence aimed at facilitating the deportation under new legislation of Italians with criminal convictions in their own country.

However, soon after Petrosino had set sail, Theodore A Bingham, who had succeeded Roosevelt as police commissioner, gave an interview to the New York Herald in which he discussed the officer's mission, which as a result was no longer so secret.

Petrosino's ship docked in Genoa, after which he stopped off in Milan, Bologna and Rome before paying a visit to his brother, Vincenzo, in Padula, en route to Sicily.

Petrosino's hearse paraded through New York

Soon after he arrived in Palermo, Petrosino received a message from somebody claiming to have information that would be helpful to him and arranged to meet them in the city's Piazza della Marina. It was a trap.  While waiting for his supposed informant, Petrosino was hit by three bullets from the gun of a Mafia assassin and died on the spot.

A funeral took place in Palermo, after which Petrosino's body was returned to New York and another ceremony took place at St Patrick's Cathedral in Mott Street, which runs parallel with Mulberry Street in Little Italy, after which a procession of 200,000 people followed the coffin to the Calvary Cemetery in Queens.

No one was convicted of Petrosino's killing, although Vito Cascio Ferro, one of his targets for arrest, was detained, only to be released when an associate came forward with an alibi. More than a century later, a descendant under investigation by the Italian police confessed that it was known within the family that Vito Cascio Ferro had ordered his murder.

Travel tip:

Padula, which is situated just outside the beautiful Cilento National Park in Campania, is a small community of just over 5,200 people about 100km south of Salerno, notable for the Padula Charterhouse - Certosa di Padula in Italian - the largest monastery in Italy with a physical area of some 51,500 square metres (12.7 acres) and 320 rooms.

One of the entrances to the Certosa di Padula

Travel tip:

The majestic Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park extends from the Tyrhennian coast to the feet of the Campania-Lucania Apennines. It includes coastal and mountain areas which play host to an abundance of wild life but there is also a rich cultural history, notably the Greek ruins at Velia and Paestum. 

More reading:

Libero Grassi - the Palermo businessman who refused to pay his pizzo

Carlo Gambino - was the notorious Mafia Don the model for Puzo's Godfather?

(Photo of Certosa di Padula by Enrico Viceconte CC BY-SA 2.0)

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