Andrea Doria – Admiral

Military commander with outstanding tactical talent

Andrea Doria's portrait was painted by
Sebastiano del Piombo in around 1526

Andrea Doria, the most important naval leader of his time, was born on this day in 1466 in Oneglia in Liguria.

Because of his successes on both land and sea he was able to free Genoa from domination by foreign powers and reorganise its government to be more stable and effective.

Doria was part of an ancient aristocratic family but he was orphaned while still young and grew up to become a condottiero, or soldier of fortune.

He served Pope Innocent VIII, King Ferdinand I and his son Alfonso II of Naples, and other Italian princes.

Between 1503 and 1506 he helped his uncle, Domenico, crush the Corsican revolt against the rule of Genoa.

Attracted to the sea, Doria fitted out eight galleys and patrolled the Mediterranean, fighting the Ottoman Turks and Barbary pirates, adding to his wealth and reputation along the way.

He then entered the service of Francis I of France who was fighting the Emperor Charles V in Italy and helped him capture Genoa.

A medal bearing the image of Andrea
Doria, who continued to sail in his '80s

But after becoming disillusioned with French policies in Genoa, Doria transferred his support to Charles V and helped him drive the French out of Genoa.

Charles made him grand admiral of the imperial fleet and gave him the title of Prince of Melfi.

As the new ruler of Genoa, Doria imposed a government made up of the city’s main aristocratic families. His reformed constitution for the city was to last until 1797.

He also continued to command naval expeditions against the Turks and helped Charles V extend his domination of the Italian peninsula.

In 1547 a rival family started to plot against Doria and they eventually murdered his nephew, Giannetino, but the conspirators were quickly defeated and severely punished by Doria.

The house where Andrea Doria was born, overlooking
the port in Oneglia on the Ligurian coast

At the age of 84, Doria was still regularly sailing against the Barbary pirates and he went to fight against the French when they seized Corsica, which was under the control of Genoa at the time Doria finally retired in 1555 and passed his command to his great nephew, Giovanni Andrea Doria.

Doria died in 1560 in Genoa at the age of 93 and left his estate to Giovanni Andrea.  The family of Doria-Pamphili-Landi is descended from the famous Admiral and bears his title, Prince of Melfi.

Several Italian and US ships have been named after Andrea Doria.  An Italian passenger ship, the SS Andrea Doria, sank off the coast of Massachusetts after colliding with another ship in 1956, causing the deaths of 46 people.

A football club named after him - the Società Ginnastica Andrea Doria, founded in 1895 - was a forerunner of one of Genoa's two major teams, Sampdoria, which was formed in 1946 after a merger of SG Andrea Doria with another club, Sampierdarenese.

The port city of Genoa has a proud
 history as a maritime power

Travel tip:

Genoa, which was once ruled over by Doria, is the capital city of Liguria and the sixth largest city in Italy. It has earned the nickname of La Superba because of its proud history as a major port. Part of the old town was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2006 because of the wealth of beautiful 16th century palaces there.

Oneglia is part of the larger port of Imperia in Liguria

Travel tip:

Oneglia, where Doria was born, was a town on the Ligurian coast that had been purchased by the Doria family in the 13th century. It was joined to Porto Maurizio in 1923 by Mussolini  to form the comune of Imperia. The area has become well known for cultivating flowers and olives and there is a Museum of the Olive in the part of the city that used to be Oneglia.



More reading:

When Genoa's ships routed the fleet of Pisa

How architect Renzo Piano gave new life to the port of his home town of Genoa

The founding of Genoa Cricket and Football Club

Also on this day:

1485: The birth of writer and stateswoman Veronica Gambara

1954: The birth of Godfather actress Simonetta Stefanelli

1954: The death of tenor Beniamino Gigli


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Luciano Berio – composer

War casualty who became significant figure in Italian music

Luciano Berio was an experimental
composer with a prolific output

The avant-garde composer Luciano Berio, whose substantial catalogue of diverse work made him one of the most significant figures in music in Italy in the modern era, was born on this day in 1925 in Oneglia, on the Ligurian coast.

Noted for his innovative combining of voices and instruments and his pioneering of electronic music, Berio composed more than 170 pieces between 1937 and his death in 2003.

His most famous works are Sinfonia, a composition for orchestra and eight voices in five movements commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1968, and dedicated to the conductor Leonard Bernstein, and his Sequenza series of 18 virtuoso solo works that each featured a different instrument, or in one case a female voice alone.

Berio's musical fascinations included Italian opera, particularly Monteverdi and Verdi, the 20th-century modernism of Stravinsky, the Romantic symphonies of Schubert, Brahms and Mahler, folk songs, jazz and the music of the Beatles.

All these forms influenced him in one way or another and even his most experimental work paid homage to the past. In writing operas, concerti, string quartets or pieces for solo instruments, Berio could be said to have contributed to tradition, even if composing pieces that followed traditional forms was far from his thinking.

The apparent chaos of Sinfonia, for example, may seem as far away from a traditional symphony as is possible and yet conforms to the principle of what constitutes a symphony, a combination of different moods, keys and emotions. 

Berio at a formal appearance in The Hague in 1972, pictured
with Princess Beatrix and Prince Claus of The Netherlands

The eight voices often speak or shout rather than sing, yet in superimposing texts by authors ranging from James Joyce to Samuel Beckett and snatches from many classical and romantic works of music on to a framework of the scherzo of Mahler's Second Symphony, Berio creates, by definition, a symphony.

Berio came from a musical background. Both his grandfather Adolfo and father Ernesto were organists and he might have become a concert pianist but for the misfortune that befell him in the Second World War.

It was late in the conflict – 1944 – when he was called up. He considered joining the resistance movement, but feared what the consequences might be for his family and so accepted conscription.  Given a loaded gun on his first day, he was trying to learn how it worked when it went off, badly injuring his right hand.

He spent three months in a military hospital before fleeing to Como, joining the partisans after all. When, after the war, he entered the Milan Conservatory, it was clear his hand injury would prevent him achieving proficiency as a pianist, at which point he decided to concentrate on composition.

A suite for piano he had written in 1947 was his first work to be publicly performed. He earned his keep by accompanying singing classes and accepting conducting engagements in small opera houses.

The Studio Fonologia in Milan that Berio helped establish

One of the singers he accompanied was Cathy Berberian, an American soprano with whom he fell in love and married within a few months. He visited the United States for the first time on honeymoon and thereafter became a frequent visitor, where he won a scholarship to study at Tanglewood in Massachusetts, the summer home of the Boston Philharmonic.

At the same time, Berio was beginning to experiment with electronic music.  He and Bruno Maderna, another Italian he had met at an annual summer school on Germany where avant-garde composers would congregate, became co-directors of an electronic studio within the Milan studios of the state broadcaster, RAI.

He and Berberian divorced in 1964 but Berio continued to spend much of his time in New York with his second wife, Susan Oyama, a Japanese psychology student. He had founded the Juilliard Ensemble while teaching at the Juilliard School of Music. He resigned from the Juilliard in 1971, divorcing Oyama in the same year.

He returned to Italy and bought a house to renovate in the hill town of Radicondoli, near Siena, where he planted vineyards and fruit trees. He moved into the house in 1975 and was soon married for a third time, to the Israeli musicologist, Talia Pecker.  

Berio, whose other acclaimed works include Opera and Coro, both composed in the 1970s, La Vera Storia (1981) and Outis (1996), remained an active composer until his death.  He was Distinguished Composer in Residence at Harvard University until 2000, when he became president of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where he was living at the time of his death.

The waterfront at Imperia, looking towards Porto Maurizio

Travel tip:

Oneglia, where Luciano Berio was born, ceased to exist as a town in its own right in 1923, when it and its neighbour, Porto Maurizio, were subsumed into a new city of Imperia, created by Benito Mussolini as part of his drive to create ideal Fascist cities. Today, Imperia is part industrial port and part tourist resort.  What used to be Oneglia is at the eastern end of Imperia, around Piazza Dante, which is at the centre of a long shopping street, Via Aurelia.

The church of Santi Simone e Guida
in the ancient town of Radicondoli

Travel tip:

Radicondoli, situated about 50km (31 miles) west of Siena, is a beautiful walled medieval town of Etruscan origins, perched on a hilltop and offering outstanding views of the surrounding countryside, looking out over typical rolling Tuscan hills.  The town itself, with quaint cobbled streets, is home to little more than 1,000 inhabitants, with an economy and lifestyle based on farming, and a diet rich in local produce.

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