Procopio Cutò - chef and entrepreneur

Sicilian who popularised coffee and gelato in 17th century Paris

Procopio Cutò, born in Sicily, founded
the most successful café in Paris

The chef and café proprietor Procopio Cutò, who opened one of the earliest coffee houses in Paris and has been credited with introducing Italian ice cream to the French capital, was born in Sicily on this day in 1651.

Cutò, whose full name was Francesco Procopio Cutò and at times called himself Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli, or François Procope, was the owner and founder of the Café Procope, which thanks to its illustrious clientele can claim to have been the first literary coffee house in Paris.

The café opened for business in 1686 and traded continuously for around 200 years before closing in the late 19th century.  

The name was revived in the 1950s and the original premises in Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie - in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés quarter on the left bank of the Seine - is again called Café Procope, although it is now a restaurant rather than a coffee house.

It was thought for many years that Cutò was born in Aci Trezza, a town on Sicily’s eastern coast, a little over 10km (six miles) north of Catania, the island’s second largest city. However, the discovery of baptismal certificate in the archives of the Church of Sant'Ippolito in the Capo district of Palermo suggests he was born in the capital.

The surname Cutò, while common in Sicily at the time of his birth, is of Greek origin. The first name Procopio was inspired by the Greek historian Procopius.

Although there is evidence that flavours were added to snow and ice as a refreshment in ancient Rome and Greece, ice cream had yet to be produced commercially as Cutò was growing up.

Café Procope's elegant and luxurious decor
 attracted an upmarket, intellectual clientele

Sorbets had been introduced to Sicily by Arabs. Cutò’s grandfather had invented a machine that could produce sorbets, which were ‘frozen’ using a combination of natural snow or ice and salt, which kept the ice cooler for longer. When he died, he left the machine to his grandson, who made some modifications to it and believed he could use it to make sorbets on a larger scale. 

With dreams of making his fortune by producing and selling his ices, Cutò chose to try his luck in Paris because, with a population of half a million, the French capital was at the time the largest city in Europe.

Having travelled through mainland Italy, he is thought to have arrived there at some point between 1670 and 1674. He took jobs along the way, in one of which he acquired cooking skills, joined a guild of drinks-makers soon after reaching Paris and becoming apprenticed to an Armenian, called Pascal, who had a kiosk serving lemonade and coffee on Rue de Tournan. It was one of the first such establishments to call itself a café. When Pascal moved to London in 1675, he allowed Cutò to take over.

In the meantime, using the gelato-making methods he had learned from his grandfather, Cutò developed a range of flavoured ices and successfully applied for a licence to sell them from his kiosk. In search of a bigger market, he opened a second stall at the nearby Foire Saint-Germain, a large covered marketplace which staged annual fairs that could accommodate 300 merchants.

The writer Voltaire, who
was a Procope regular

In 1686, Cutò relocated his kiosk to the Café Procope’s present location, on a street which was then called Rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain-des-Prés.  Although there were coffee houses in Paris already, they were mainly frequented by the lower classes and immigrants.

Cutò believed that if he changed the image of the coffee house, he could appeal to a wealthier, more sophisticated branch of Parisian society. With that aim, he bought up a redundant bath house, stripped out all its bathing facilities and repurposed it as a luxury meeting place, with crystal chandeliers, wall mirrors and marble tables. 

It soon became a place where stylish gentlemen would develop a taste for coffee and Cutò’s fruit sorbets, which were served in porcelain cups by elegant waiters. 

Cutò’s big break came in 1689, when the Comédie-Française opened its doors in a theatre across the street from his café. A new crowd of young intellectuals began to frequent the Café Procope, establishing the venue as one of the first literary cafes.

Over time, the likes of Voltaire, Maximilien Robespierre, Victor Hugo, Pierre Beaumarchais, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Honoré de Balzac would become regulars. Oscar Wilde and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are also known to have visited, along with American political luminaries such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.  Even Napoleon Bonaparte took coffee there.

The Café Procope, in Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie,

  is still in business today as a thriving restaurant 

Franklin, one of America’s ‘founding fathers’, is said to have drafted the terms of the 1778 Treaty of Alliance with French king Louis XVI while sitting at one of Café Procope’s tables.

The Café Procope thus became the most famous and successful café in Paris and is credited with turning France into a coffee-drinking society.

Cutò, who married three times and fathered at least 14 children, became wealthy as a result. Having adopted the surname Dei Coltelli soon after arriving in Paris when his name was misspelled as Couteaux - the French word for knives (coltelli in Italian) - in 1702 he changed it to François Procope not long after becoming a French citizen.

In 1716, he handed the running of Café Procope to his second son, Alexandre. Cutò continued to run his kiosk at the Foire Saint-Germain before passing away in 1727 at the age of 76. 

The dramatic rock formation off the coast at Aci
Trezza is known as the Islands of the Cyclops

Travel tip:

Aci Trezza, which for many years was thought to have been the birthplace of Procopio Cutò, is a small fishing town within easy reach of the Sicilian city of Catania that has become a popular resort. It has rocky volcanic beaches which look out over some dramatic rock formations in the sea known as the Islands of the Cyclops, sometimes called the Faraglioni of Trezza. The main part of the town is clustered around the harbour and the Chiesa Madre di San Giovanni Battista, Aci Trezza’s parish church. Many houses have been painted in pastel colours. The town is particularly lively in the evening thanks to its reputation for having outstanding fish restaurants. The town hosts a fish festival every July. Its connection with Cutò may have arisen because Aci Trezza is one of many towns that sit in the shadow of Mount Etna, where snow from the upper slopes used to be collected for turning into sorbets. It is possible that Cutò may have visited the area while perfecting his recipe for gelato.

The daily Mercato di Capo runs the whole length
of the Via Sant'Agostino in the centre of Palermo

Travel tip:

Capo, the neighbourhood of Palermo where Procopio Cutò is likely to have been born, is one of the original four quarters of Palermo established during the Spanish rule of the city, which lasted from early 15th century until Italy became a unified country in the 19th century. Also known as Seralcadi, derived from the Arabic name Sari al Cadì, the area nestles between Palermo’s duomo - the Cattedrale della Santa Vergine Maria Assunta - the Teatro Massimo, and Via Maqueda, one of the city’s main thoroughfares. The largest opera house in Italy, able to accommodate an audience of 1,350 people, the Renaissance-style Teatro Massimo opened in 1897, with an initial capacity of 3,000. It closed in 1974 for supposedly minor repairs but a lack of funding prevented its re-opening for 23 years. A major attraction for visitors to Capo is the huge, historic outdoor street market, which occupies virtually the length of Via Sant’Agostino, selling everything from fresh fish, fruit and vegetables to clothes, household items and local handicrafts. Street food can be found in abundance, in particular the Sicilian specialities - arancini, cannoli and panelle.

Also on this day:

1621: The election of Pope Gregory XV

1770: The birth of classical guitarist and composer Ferdinando Carulli

1891: The birth of left-wing politician Pietro Nenni

1953: The birth of boxer Vito Antuofermo

1953: The birth of missionary Ezechiele Ramin

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Louis Visconti - architect

Roman who made his mark on Paris

The French painter Théophile Vauchelet's
portrait of  the architect Louis Visconti 

The architect Louis Visconti, who designed a number of public buildings and squares as well as numerous private residences in Paris, was born on this day in 1791 in Rome.

Notably, Visconti was the architect chosen to design the tomb to house the remains of Napoleon Bonaparte after King Louis Philippe I obtained permission from Britain in 1840 to return them from Saint Helena, the remote island in the South Atlantic where the former emperor had died in exile in 1921.

Born Louis Tullius Joachim Visconti, he came from a family of archaeologists. His grandfather, Giambattista Antonio Visconti was the founder of the Vatican Museums and his father, Ennio Quirino Visconti, was an archaeologist and art historian.

Ennio had been a consul of the short-lived Roman Republic, proclaimed in February 1798 after Louis Alexandre Berthier, a general of Napoleon, had invaded Rome, but was forced to leave with the restoration of papal control.

He and his family moved to Paris and were naturalised as French citizens, with Ennio becoming a curator of antiquities and paintings at the Musée du Louvre. 

Visconti's magnificent tomb for Napoleon Bonaparte, in
red porphyry on a granite base, standing 16ft high

In 1808, Louis enrolled at Paris's École des Beaux-Arts.  He excelled in architecture and secured second prize in the architecture section of the Prix de Rome in 1814 and the architecture department prize at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1817.

He was was appointed by the city in 1826 to oversee building works in the 3rd and 8th arrondissements and subsequently as curator of the 8th section of public monuments, which comprised the Bibliothèque Royale, the monument on Place des Victoires, Porte Saint-Martin, Saint-Denis and the Colonne Vendôme.

He became divisional architect in 1848, and government architect in 1849.

In May 1848, he produced a first-draft design for completing the Palais du Louvre. He was made architect to the Palais des Tuileries in July 1852 and architect to Napoleon III the following year.

The Hôtel de Pontalba in Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré,
now home to the US Ambassador to France

Visconti built a number of Renaissance-style public fountains in Paris, including the Fontaine Gaillon, the Fontaine Louvois, the Fontaine Molière, the Fontaine Quatre Evèques and the Fontaine Saint-Sulpice. He was an important participant in the revival of the Picturesque and Gothic styles, as is reflected in the Château de Lussy (1844), which is modelled after an English cottage.

Among several large houses he designed, the Hôtel de Pontalba in Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, built in 1839, is an outstanding example.

Hôtel de Pontalba is an example of an hôtel particulier, a type of large townhouse. It was commissioned by New Orleans-born Baroness Micaela Almonester de Pontalba. Nowadays, it is the official residence of the United States Ambassador to France.

During his time as the official architect for the Louvre under Napoleon III, he was commissioned to design the tomb for Napoleon Bonaparte.

Louis Philippe had arranged for Napoleon’s remains to be brought to France in 1840 and they were first buried in the Chapelle Saint-Jérôme in Hôtel des Invalides, the complex of buildings in the 7th arrondissement of Paris that contains museums and monuments relating to the military history of France, as well as a hospital and a retirement home for war veterans, the building's original purpose.

The buildings include the Dôme des Invalides, the tallest church in Paris at a height of 107m (351ft), which contains the tombs of some of France's war heroes. It became Napoleon’s final resting place in Visconti’s magnificent, dramatic tomb, crafted in red porphyry on a green granite base, circled by a crown of laurels, standing 5m (16 feet) high and 4.5m wide.

The remains of the Forum of ancient Rome attract some
4.5 million visitors every year

Travel tip:

When the new Roman Republic was declared in 1798, its supporters symbolically gathered in the Foro Romano, the remains of the Forum of ancient Rome, a rectangular piazza (square) surrounded by important government buildings at the centre of the city. For centuries the Forum was the centre of day-to-day life in Rome, a market place but also the venue for public speeches, criminal trials, elections and triumphal processions. Statues and monuments were built to commemorate the city's great men. Located between the Palatine and Capitoline Hills, the Forum today attracts some 4.5 million visitors every year.

Find a hotel in Rome with Booking.com

Caravaggio's The Entombment of Christ
is among the Vatican's art treasures 

Travel tip:

The Vatican Museums, located inside the Vatican City, display works from the immense collection amassed by popes throughout the centuries including several renowned Roman sculptures and some of the most important masterpieces of Renaissance art in the world. The museums, founded by Pope Julius II in the 16th century, contain roughly 70,000 works, of which 20,000 are on display. The Sistine Chapel, with its ceiling decorated by Michelangelo, and the Stanze di Raffaello, decorated by Raphael, are on the visitor route through the Vatican Museums, which are visited by some six million people each year, making in the fifth most visited art museum in the world. The museums employ a full-time staff of 640 people.

More reading:

Why Luigi Vanvitelli was the 18th century's most celebrated architect

How architect Giovanni Battista Vaccarini reshaped Catania in Sicily

The founding of the papal Swiss Guard

Also on this day:

1881: The birth of Futurist painter Carlo Carrà

1917: The birth of film director Giuseppe De Santis

1929: The Lateran Treaty declares the Vatican an independent state

1948: The birth of footballer Carlo Sartori

1995: The birth of singer Gianluca Ginoble


(Picture credits: Napoleon Bonaparte's tomb by Son of Groucho; Hôtel de Pontalba by Mouloud47; Rome Forum by Rennett Stowe; via Wikemedia Commons)

(Paintings: Portrait of Visconti - Musée Carnavalet, Paris; Caravaggio's The Entombment of Christ - Pinacoteca Vaticano, Rome)

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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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Adriano Panatta – tennis player

French Open champion was most at home on the clay

Adriano Panata was at the peak of his career in 1976

The only tennis player ever to defeat Bjorn Borg at Roland Garros in Paris, Adriano Panatta was born on this day in 1950 in Rome.

A successful singles player, Panatta reached the peak of his career in 1976 when he won the French Open, gaining his only Grand Slam title, defeating the American player, Harold Solomon, in the final 6-1, 6-4, 4-6, 7-6.

Panatta learnt to play tennis as a youngster on the clay courts of the Tennis Club Parioli in Rome, where his father was the caretaker.

He won top-level titles at Bournemouth in 1973, Florence in 1974 and at Kitzbuhel in Austria and Stockholm in 1975.

In the same year that he won the French Open, Panatta won the Italian Open in Rome, beating Guillermo Vilas in the final 2-6, 7-6, 6-2, 7-6. In the first round of the competition he had saved 11 match points in his match against the Australian Kim Warwick.

Panatta ended 1976 by helping Italy capture its only Davis Cup title, winning two singles and a doubles rubber in the final against Chile. He also reached his career-high singles ranking of World number four that year.

Adriano Panatta aged 20 in 1970 - the
 year he beat Nicola Pietrangeli

The only player to have defeated Bjorn Borg in the French Open, Panatta had the distinction of achieving this feat twice, in the fourth round in 1973 and in the quarter finals in 1976.  

Panatta’s most notable performance at Wimbledon was in 1979 when he reached the quarter finals. 

In all, he won 10 tournaments in singles and 17 in doubles. He is one of only four Italian players to have won a Grand Slam tournament, the others being Nicola Pietrangeli, who won the French open in 1959 and successfully defended his title in 1960, Francesca Schiavone, who won the French in 2010, and Flavia Pennetta, who was US Open champion in 2015.

It was by defeating Pietrangeli in five sets at the Italian International championships in Bologna in 1970 that Panatta first gave notice of his potential to reach the top.

As wells as helping Italy win the Davis Cup in 1976, Panatta assisted his country to reach the final in 1977, 1979 and 1980.

Since retiring as a player in 1983, Panatta has served as captain of Italy’s Davis Cup team and as Tournament Director of the Rome Masters.  For a while, he pursued an interest in speedboat racing and also served on Rome City Council as councillor in charge of sports and major events. For a number of years he worked as a television commentator.

The Parioli district is a pleasant Rome suburb with
bars and pavement cafes

Travel tip:

The Tennis Club Parioli, where Panatta learnt to play, is in Largo Uberto De Morpergo in the Parioli district, a northern suburb of Rome. The name comes from Monti Parioli, which are a series of hills. During the Fascist regime, many high-ranking party officials had residences in the Parioli district. Nowadays it is one of Rome’s most elegant residential areas and a number of foreign embassies are located there.

The Italian Open attracts large crowds to the Foro Italico

Travel tip:

The Italian Open, which Panatta won in 1976, is one of the most prestigious clay court tournaments in the world. It takes place each year at the Foro Italico, formerly known as Foro Mussolini, which was built between 1928 and 1938. Foro Italico is considered a prime example of Italian Fascist architecture, which was encouraged by Mussolini. The purpose was to bring the Olympic Games to Rome in 1944, however London won the bid. In the event, the 1944 Olympic Games had to be cancelled because of the Second World War.

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